Elle
With Elle, Dutch director Paul Verhoeven — known for genre- twisting and unsettling films such as RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls and Starship Troopers — has made a troubling and often outrageous black comedy about sexual assault and its fallout.
Elle ( French for she or her) will make you laugh, but it might also disturb your sleep.
Its lingering effect centers on the nervy, imperious lead performance of Isabelle Huppert as Michele Leblanc, a savvy and successful computer game entrepreneur. It’s an utterly fearless turn in which Huppert defies the audience to withdraw its empathy for an arrogant, amoral character who deals with being violently attacked in her stylish Paris home with remarkable poise. That’s because she’s not powerless. She intends to take revenge on her attacker. And the way she goes about it is incredibly stealthy and not at all predictable. That’s why Elle is so compelling.
Huppert recently won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama for her work here, even though Elle is better read as a comedy or horror film.
No wonder — not only is she a piece of work, but she has a comically absurd family that resembles the cast of Arrested Development. Her mother, Irene ( Judith Magre), hires ridiculously younger men to serve as companions and sexual partners. Her disappointingly inept 20- something son Vincent ( Jonas Bloquet) is under the thumb of his beautiful, bossy
girlfriend. Her ex- husband, Richard ( Charles Berling), is a whiny, penniless writer and teacher whom she can’t help tormenting with understated glee. Her smart, talented millennial employees, with the exception of one, hate her. She sleeps with her best friend/ business partner Anna’s ( Anne Consigny) jerk of
a husband, Robert ( Christian Berkel), without the slightest hint of guilt. Her father is an infamous murderer who is firmly locked up after killing 27 children in one day. She has a cat with a temperament similar to hers. And she is coolly intrigued by an attractive neighbor ( Laurent Lafitte) who’s married to an earnest do- gooder whose Catholicism rules her every move.
There’s no reason to care about what happens to capable, efficient Michele, whose chilly outlook on life allows her to blithely announce her rape to Anna, Robert and Richard at a restaurant, then, observing their shocked faces, glances at the menu and wonders, “Should we order?” — until her conniving reaction to being raped, which borrows much from her computergame prowess, proves a delectable solution to a confounding mystery.
As a common Arkansas defense would put it, he had it comin’.