29/05/2019 - Cult auteur Brian De Palma continues his work in European film with this disappointing Danish police noir

Brian De Palma’s Domino [+see also:
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film profile] is a lurid noir potboiler, inspired by the grave subject of contemporary Europe’s fight against terrorism. The 30th feature in a long and cherished career, it is undeniably one of the New Hollywood legend’s weakest films, although he can’t be blamed for its failures entirely. A troubled, underfunded production, Domino was shot back in the summer of 2017 and is finally being released in a highly truncated form (around 80 minutes, excluding credits) following a dispute between De Palma and his producers. The film begins a belated international rollout this week, starting in Hungary on 30 May, and then continuing to Italy and Lithuania in June.

Domino’s plot is an ungainly mix of hardboiled detective fiction, fused with the cloak-and-dagger espionage tropes of Hitchcock or James Bond. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (of Game of Thrones fame) looks great but gives a notably weak performance as Christian, who starts the movie as an ordinary Copenhagen cop before being plunged into a mystery of almost surreal complexity. The film’s opening set piece sees Christian and his older detective partner Lars (Søren Malling) called in to investigate a domestic disturbance, which turns fatal when the fleeing perpetrator (Eriq Ebouaney) stabs Lars in the neck. Previewing the film’s further tonal awkwardness, the sequence ends with Christian and the perp farcically hanging from the building’s roof drainage pipes, as if in a broad slapstick comedy.

After he flees the scene in mysterious circumstances, Christian and his new force partner Alex (Carice van Houten) identify the assailant as Ezra Tarza, a former Danish special forces agent born in Libya and now suspected of involvement in a spree of Islamic terrorist attacks afflicting the continent. But nothing is as it seems, as shifty CIA agent Joe Martin (Guy Pearce) captures Ezra first and uses him as a pawn to ensnare more dangerous suspects (depicted as a North African cell of ISIS), who are planning suicide attacks at large public events: a Dutch film festival, followed by a bullfighting ring in Almería.

Depicting these terrorist incidents is surely part of what attracted De Palma (who’s noted for his political conscience) to Petter Sklavan’s original screenplay. But the individual attacks themselves are staged with a crude unreality, where unusual methods of capturing the suicide bombing on film (such as with a hovering drone, or a video camera affixed to a machine gun) take precedence. His perverse conceit is to present ISIS’s propaganda department as filmmakers par excellence, their audience-baiting imagery stirring up fear as if they were master directors of fiction. Still, the satirical intent of this is hard to read, beyond noting the irony of De Palma’s own talents being co-opted by a malign force. Reviewing an ISIS YouTube video at the police headquarters, Christian can only note the aesthetics – “Look at that drone shot!” he yells, almost like a film critic – rather than the atrocities that the video shows.

Like his last film, the Berlin-set Passion [+see also:
film review
trailer
making of
film profile], Domino finds De Palma slumming it with material his talent far exceeds. His strongest work (Blow Out, Carrie) perfectly bridges artful technique and trashy, lowbrow subject matter; yet in these recent cases, it’s all trash with little art to be found. Despite managing to surmount a stressful, multi-country shoot, where production money kept running out, it seems like he would always have struggled to elevate this very routine, procedural script into the twisted satire he’s most celebrated for.

Domino is a co-production by Denmark, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and the USA. Its main producers are Michel Schønnemann, of Schønne Film (Denmark), and Els Vandevorst, for N279 Entertainment (Netherlands). Its international sales are handled by IM Global.