Elle (2016)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Film Review

It has been ten years since Paul Verhoeven (the director of such hits as RoboCop, Total Recall and Basic Instinct) made his last film Black Book (2006).  Now the provocative, hard-to-pin-down Dutch filmmaker is back with a vengeance, defying conventions and braving taboos like never before with a seedy little shocker that has been labelled a 'rape comedy', although its author decries the epithet.  Elle, Verhoeven's first French language feature, is loosely based on Philippe Djian's novel Oh... and is a considerably feistier affair than previous Djian adaptations, which include Bleu comme l'enfer, 37°2 le matin and Impardonnables.  It is a film that Verhoeven probably could never have made (or at least not with any degree of success) without the complicity of an actress who has made a lifelong career of playing perverse and pathologically controlling women, namely Isabelle Huppert.

As the cold and steely resolved dominatrix of Verhoeven's bizarre revenge fantasy Huppert is clearly in her element, and creates her most vivid screen alter ego yet - a magnificent amalgam of her previous screen characters that range from the sexually repressed pianist of Michael Haneke's La Pianiste (2001) to the driven corporate investigator in Claude Chabrol's L'Ivresse du pouvoir (2006).  More than anything, it is the utter conviction that the actress brings to her portrayal that makes Verhoeven's latest film so absorbing and shocking.  Her character is an extreme example of the independent modern woman but at no point does she strike us as a flagrant caricature.  The reasons for Michèle's obsessive reluctance to be controlled by men and her apparent perversity become glaringly apparent when a traumatic episode in her childhood is revealed to us.  Far from being a sick woman, she is shown to be a prisoner of her own past, incapable of releasing the feminine part of herself - the 'elle' of the film's title.  It is a terrifying portrait of a woman imprisoned in her own warped ego.

Verhoeven begins the film in his typically ultra-provocative manner with a rape scene of the most explicit and brutal kind.  Michèle's perverse nature is at once apparent when, immediately after this horrendous experience, she merely gets up, clears up the mess and takes a bath.  This is as shocking as the film gets and it neatly sets up what is to follow - a twisted game of cat and mouse in which the rape victim turns the tables on her unknown attacker, as much to exorcise her personal demons as to prove that she is the dominant sex.  It sounds like the plot of a pretty grim and salacious thriller but Verhoeven again confounds our expectations by skewing it towards absurdist farce, bringing a savage irony that turns the film into the most outrageous of social satires.  With its caustic sideswipes at bourgeois morality, Elle cannot help looking like a Claude Chabrol comedy, but with a thick sickly garnish of sadism and razor-sharp nastiness.

Although Huppert's presence dominates the entire film - to the extent that you'd swear it was conceived with her in mind - it is worth acknowledging the fine contributions from the supporting cast, whose portrayals of apparent everyday normality make the central protagonist look all the more unhinged.  Charles Berling is on form as Huppert's totally demoralised ex (he looks as cracked and deflated as a well-worn condom), and Laurent Lafitte and Virginie Efira have never been better directed, nor more convincing, than they are here.  Judith Magre leaves her mark as Huppert's nymphomaniac mother (perversion clearly runs in the family) and Jonas Bloquet is just the son you would expect of a mother with extreme matriarchal tendencies.

There is no shortage of suspects for the mysterious masked rapist and Verhoeven has great fun imitating Hitchcock with the film's mischievous whodunit strand, never missing an opportunity to extract a laugh even when the plot goes cruising off into more disturbing waters.  Paul Verhoeven, the director who delights in shocking, and Isabelle Huppert, the actress who revels in perversion of every kind, make a dream match and with Elle both attain the summit of their art.  A full-blooded satire that will no doubt have the feminists up in arms and burning effigies of its director in the streets, here is a gutsy no-nonsense mould-breaker that will turn your stomach and make you laugh out loud at the same time.  It's cinema's most apocalyptic vision of girl power yet.

Film Synopsis

Michèle Leblanc is the managing director of a successful video games company.  She is not the kind of woman who allows others to take control of her life.  Fiercely independent, and tough with it, she governs her private life with the same discipline and tenacity that have made her a leading businesswoman.  She is subservient no man, and this could explain why she has ended up with a failed marriage, a submissive lover and a weakling son.  Michèle gets a very rude awakening when a cagouled stranger breaks into her house one day and rapes her in front of her cat.  The ordeal over, Michèle refuses to do the obvious, which is to report the incident to the police.  She has her own reasons for not doing so.  Instead, she calmly clears up the mess and takes a hot bath.  Over the days that follow, Michèle starts hearing strange noises in her house and becomes convinced she is being spied on.  She is encouraged when her neighbours Patrick and Rebecca tell her they have seen her attacker.  It seems that the rapist is still at large and intends coming back for a second helping.  Rather than await a further humiliation, Michèle decides to go on the offensive and give her attacker a taste of his own medicine...