Elle (18.)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven.
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Anne Consigny, Laurent Lafitte, Christian Berkel, Charles Berling and Jonas Bloquet. French with subtitles. 130 mins.
Paul Verhoeven has never found a nose that he couldn't put out of joint. Over four decades he has careered wildly through the film world – Europe, Hollywood, back to Europe – like some cinematic Boris Johnson, pointedly going out of his way to tread on toes and cause offence. He's a misanthrope, but at least he's a get-up-and-go misanthrope, souring the world and the wider universe (in his masterpiece Starship Troopers) with zeal and gusto. In Michele Leblanc (Huppert) he may have found his perfect lead character – a woman who's not going to let something like being brutally raped by a masked assailant in her own home, make her sympathetic.
After the assault she cleans up the mess and goes about her everyday life. For her that means being the boss of a company making violent console games; having an affair with her best friend's husband; despairing of her son and his dealings with his shrewish girlfriend; being rude to most people she knows and having strangers tip rubbish on her in cafes because of her notoriety stemming from an event in her youth. Now, on top of all that, she has to try to work out who the rapist is.
Elle is a black comedy, which is how it can get away with turning the rape into a whodunnit. It is genuinely funny though and enormously powerful; a little reminiscent of Cache. This is Dutch born Verhoeven's first French film but he takes to it like a canard to eau. However strange and troubling the piece gets, the presence of Huppert is always there to reassure us. Verhoeven has a history of abusing actresses – in Black Book Carice Van Houten gets stripped naked and has excrement dumped all over her; Sharon Stone claims he tricked her into the upskirt shot in Basic Instinct – but surely someone as forbiddingly serious as her wouldn't get involved with anything that did genuinely trivialise rape, would she?
There will be some who, not unreasonably, will object to the casual way it goes through such contentious material, that it behoves Verhoeven to give it some context or meaning. I thoroughly enjoyed the provocation up until the last ten minutes. All the way through I was fascinated by it, waiting to see where it was going with this. By the end though it seemed to me that actually what we were watching was a simply a group of chic, stylish but thoroughly ghastly people going about their ghastly business in a ghastly way – just like every other French film.
Directed by Paul Verhoeven.
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Anne Consigny, Laurent Lafitte, Christian Berkel, Charles Berling and Jonas Bloquet. French with subtitles. 130 mins.
Paul Verhoeven has never found a nose that he couldn't put out of joint. Over four decades he has careered wildly through the film world – Europe, Hollywood, back to Europe – like some cinematic Boris Johnson, pointedly going out of his way to tread on toes and cause offence. He's a misanthrope, but at least he's a get-up-and-go misanthrope, souring the world and the wider universe (in his masterpiece Starship Troopers) with zeal and gusto. In Michele Leblanc (Huppert) he may have found his perfect lead character – a woman who's not going to let something like being brutally raped by a masked assailant in her own home, make her sympathetic.
After the assault she cleans up the mess and goes about her everyday life. For her that means being the boss of a company making violent console games; having an affair with her best friend's husband; despairing of her son and his dealings with his shrewish girlfriend; being rude to most people she knows and having strangers tip rubbish on her in cafes because of her notoriety stemming from an event in her youth. Now, on top of all that, she has to try to work out who the rapist is.
Elle is a black comedy, which is how it can get away with turning the rape into a whodunnit. It is genuinely funny though and enormously powerful; a little reminiscent of Cache. This is Dutch born Verhoeven's first French film but he takes to it like a canard to eau. However strange and troubling the piece gets, the presence of Huppert is always there to reassure us. Verhoeven has a history of abusing actresses – in Black Book Carice Van Houten gets stripped naked and has excrement dumped all over her; Sharon Stone claims he tricked her into the upskirt shot in Basic Instinct – but surely someone as forbiddingly serious as her wouldn't get involved with anything that did genuinely trivialise rape, would she?
There will be some who, not unreasonably, will object to the casual way it goes through such contentious material, that it behoves Verhoeven to give it some context or meaning. I thoroughly enjoyed the provocation up until the last ten minutes. All the way through I was fascinated by it, waiting to see where it was going with this. By the end though it seemed to me that actually what we were watching was a simply a group of chic, stylish but thoroughly ghastly people going about their ghastly business in a ghastly way – just like every other French film.
