Murder a la Mod

Brian De Palma’s first (and worst) feature-length endeavor, Murder a la Mod follows a handful of less-than-engrossing characters as they navigate the seedy underbelly of New York’s fashion world – with writer/director De Palma offering up a convoluted narrative that remains absolutely impenetrable from beginning to end. The degree to which the movie is unable to even fleetingly grab the viewer’s attention is nothing short of astounding, and although writer/director De Palma has infused the proceedings with a few intriguing visual flourishes (eg a sped-up, single-take run up several flights of stairs), Murder a la Mod comes off as an aggressively experimental and mostly inept art film that’s lacking in the most rudimentary of cinematic touchstones (eg compelling characters, competent plotting, etc, etc). There is, as a result, absolutely no momentum here; De Palma’s patchwork screenplay ensures that the movie clumsily lurches from one uninvolving sequence to the next, with one of the more obvious and overt examples of this an absolutely interminable scene detailing a meeting between a protagonist and an unreasonably quirky banker. It’s a pointless, monotonous interlude that’s indicative of everything that’s wrong with Murder a la Mod, with the movie’s total lack of focus ultimately ensuring that even the most ardent De Palma supporter will find little here to embrace.

no stars out of ****