Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn) is part of a team of diamond thieves pull a con at the Cannes Film Festival. Yes, not just Jess Franco makes movies about diamonds and gorgeous women. A model named Veronica (Rie Rasmussen) is wearing the jewels as part of a snake dress; she’s attending on the arm of actual director Régis Wargnier to the premiere of his actual film East/West. While Laure corners her in the bathroom and begins seducing her, Black Tie (Eriq Ebouaney) and Racine (Édouard Montoute), her team members, run interference.

Laure is conning everyone, as she steals the diamonds and somehow escapes being thrown off a balcony by being confused as a woman named Lily who has just lost her child. Lily’s parents take her in and one evening, when they go out, the real Lily comes home and kills herself, allowing Laure to become her.

Seven years later: Laure/Lily is now the wife of Ambassador Bruce Hewitt Watts (Peter Coyote) and has her picture taken when she arrives in France by Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas). That photo is found by Black Tie, who has been in jail for the last seven years. What follows is deception, sexual mind games and a mid-movie reverse where time goes backward, an audacious move in a film built around water, throwing women off bridges and people being plowed down by motor vehicles. It also returns director and writer Brian De Palma to his theme of twins and dual nature.

It’s also totally worked up, having Laure/Lily get every man in a bar hard before forcing Bardo to fight one of them and instead of the fight, De Palma zooms in on her face as she loves every second. Sure, this movie is filled with male gaze — to be fair, Romijn needs an adjective better than any I can find to describe her beauty — and yet subverted every step of the way by a main character so in front of everyone else in the film that when she gets caught, she can literally rewind time or rewrite reality.

And man, that scene through the bathroom glass with the snake costume and cuts back and forth during the diamond theft? That’s why we watch De Palma.