BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

New Jersey-born film director Brian de Palma is known for his high visual style, and that’s on full display in “Passion,” a remake of a better 2010 French film called “Love Crime. Featured at the 2012 New York Film Festival, de Palma’s version of this boardroom suspense/thriller stars Rachel MacAdams (“Mean Girls” and “Midnight in Paris”) as the high-powered, manipulative advertising executive and Noomi Rapace (the original Lisbeth Salandar in the Swedish “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”) as her ambitious but somewhat naive protegee. Once more, the screen is filled with sleek, luxurious office suites (this time in Berlin, but it could be anywhere) populated by handsome young men and women wearing tight skirts and high heels. Everyone is very thin, very smart, and very focused on getting ahead. When MacAdams announces, “There’s no backstabbing here. This is a business,” we know there will soon be all kinds of stabbing, both back and front, up and down.

The French film directed by Alain Corneau featured Kristin Scott Thomas, an actress considerably older than MacAdams, in the role of Christine, but de Palma wanted to amp up the lesbian undercurrent and so chose a younger, presumably more seductive actress. There is lots of fashion-photography style girl-on-girl action, but the two women’s closeness in age undermines Isabelle’s (Noomi Rapace) neediness and childlike trust in her boss, which was so evident in “Love Crime.” That makes her resultant fury when Christine first steals her truly inspired advertising campaign and then begins to systematically humiliate her in front of their co-workers seem overblown. The story turns into the ultimate frenemy freakout rather than the perverse mentor/protege mother/daughter relationship gone bad it was in the French film.

De Palma likes masks and mirrors, and we see Christine enjoying dressing up and role playing with her boyfriend, and with Isabelle too. “She likes to play games,” boyfriend Dirk, played by Paul Anderson, says, as if we needed the hint. A quick learner, Isabelle turns the tables on Christine when she pushes her too far, however, and then it’s a question of how she will get away with it. De Palma presents the violent act via split screen, contrasting it to a scene at the ballet. This highly stylized form of filmmaking will remind viewers of de Palma’s admiration of Hitchcock, who also liked to place viciousness and beauty side by side. In “Dressed to Kill,” “Scarface,” and “Carlito’s Way,” de Palma treated violence with an amused aestheticism, and it worked. The formula doesn’t click in “Passion,” though.

With all the camera tricks and fancy angles, there is little suspense in “Passion” and no passion at all. It’s hard to have any passion when there’s no emotion, and that’s noticeably missing from the story and the performances. Everything is sleek, shiny surfaces. More troubling is that there is little suspense. Motivations and plans are spelled out, as if de Palma thought the audience was too dumb or too bored to try and figure it out. After a while, we are.