Don’t Over-Analyze, Just Thrill to De Palma Film Fest at BAM

If you find deep significance in the work of film writer/director Brian De Palma, you’re welcome to it. De Palma himself prefers to focus on the story.

Noah Baumbach, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, dropped this tidbit during his introduction to “Sisters” last Friday, the first film in a retrospective of De Palma’s suspenseful, gleefully red-blooded work at BAM Rose Cinemas. Baumbach, who is also BAM’s Cinema Club Chair this year, described his earnest attempt to impress De Palma at a party 15 years ago with intellectual theories about his movies.

“I was trying to prove my De Palma cred to De Palma,” Baumbach said. However, the director of iconic films like “Carrie” and “Scarface” insisted that he approached his work with the most straightforward attention to story.

As Baumbach noted, however, unconscious influences “leak” into creative work, and so there are still plenty of religious, philosophical and ethical forces seething beneath De Palma’s eerie or science-fiction-laced tales of murder and derangement. “Sisters,” a 1973 thriller about surgically separated Siamese twins (Margot Kidder) and the reporter who doggedly investigates their connection to a murder (Jennifer Salt), also mines feminist issues of its day, not to mention the work of Alfred Hitchcock.

The film features hilariously unsubtle foreshadowing (hmm, I wonder if those enormous carving knives will be a problem?) and unapologetically fake gore, but De Palma’s signature filmmaking techniques still engage the attention and jangle the nerves. His split-screen storytelling reveals different viewpoints of the same scene in a way that layers on tension, even if it does look dated.

Another De Palma hallmark, the false ending, is deployed to gloriously ridiculous effect in “Femme Fatale,” coming up on Tuesday (other remaining films in the series are “Raising Cain” on Monday and “Dressed to Kill” Wednesday). The 2002 thriller, about a con woman who double-crosses her partners in a diamond theft, is flagrantly overheated but irresistibly entertaining. Rebecca Romijn as the title broad makes Angelina Jolie look like salad at a steak dinner. With her full-bore, easy sensuality, she owns the film, and Rie Rasmussen (the actress who plays her girlfriend) is no slouch either. No wonder Antonio Banderas turns paparazzo.

“Raising Cain” again draws upon the double-role-playing trope with John Lithgow as twin brothers, one of whom performs psychological experiments upon unsuspecting children. “Dressed to Kill” rounds out the series with the unrestrained spectacle of Michael Caine as a transvestite serial killer on the loose in Manhattan.

That Baumbach, who makes wryly observed comedy-dramas inclined more to cerebral than splatter (“The Squid and the Whale,” “Greenberg”), should hero-worship De Palma enough to curate a showcase is rather surprising. Both writer/directors are sharp craftsmen who set much of their work in New York, though, so perhaps that’s sufficient connection.

Or maybe, given the treat of exuberantly stylized work by a great filmmaker, to wonder why is rather beside the point.