In March 2017, Paul Verhoeven’s first proper film in a decade opened to widespread critical acclaim and a light dusting of controversy. That was before Harvey Weinstein’s exposure as a sexual predator and the ongoing conversation about the film industry’s rape culture, on set and on screen. Would this deeply disquieting psycho-thriller be received differently if it came out today? One can only imagine Elle’s heroine greeting each of Hollywood’s subsequent revelations with an insouciant gallic shrug. A world in which all men are potential rapists was always the world she lived in.
The “elle” of Verhoeven’s first French-language film is Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert), not an everywoman but a very particular woman, defined by a series of complicated relationships. At work, she urges her resentful male underlings to make the company’s new video game more graphic in its sexual violence, and takes the husband of her best friend and business partner as a lover. At home, she’s frustrated by her son’s naive submission to his domineering pregnant girlfriend, irritated by her mother’s trashy pursuit of young gigolos and tickled by any opportunity to vex her ex-husband. All of this is occasionally overshadowed by the past crimes of her father, a notorious child murderer whose surname she still uses. In short, Michèle is a woman with a very long to-do list, and taking revenge on the masked rapist who broke into her home appears to be some way down it.
Viewers searching for feminist subtext, coherent commentary or even the catharsis of violent revenge may be flummoxed by Elle. Its most significant achievement is that it allows both character and tone to be so consistently ambiguous, while its most surprising achievement is that this slipperiness makes for an exhilarating and frequently funny movie-going ride. As director of Robocop, Showgirls and Starship Troopers, Verhoeven has demonstrated an adeptness at repurposing the Hollywood blockbuster for his own wily ends. Elle sees him applying the same trick, only to a type of film that might previously have been considered above the trappings of genre – the elegant French drama.
None of this would work without an actor as magnificent as Huppert in the lead. Could Nicole Kidman have done it? Julianne Moore? Sharon Stone? Or any of the other Hollywood actors who were reportedly considered for the role before balking at David Birke’s script, adapted from the original book by Philippe Djian?
Once you’ve seen Elle, any alternative to Huppert is impossible to imagine. Her haughty gravitas lends crucial credibility to what might otherwise have been written off as another of Verhoeven’s puckish provocations, while her performance combines contradictory traits in a way that feels utterly plausible. Context also means Elle will serve as a timely reminder that human beings can react in surprising ways to devastating attacks, and that the cliched female victim has only ever existed in the movies. Though not, of course, in this one.
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