SECOND SCREEN
Isabelle Huppert won the Golden Globe for Best Actress for her performance in Elle (18) and picked up the equivalent Oscar nomination to boot, which is quite an achievement for a Frenchlanguage film but also smacks of a fine but often overlooked actress finally being rewarded for her vast body of work over the past 40 years. Nothing wrong with that, except that the accolades heaped upon Huppert do slightly disguise what a strange, challenging and downright contentious film this is.
But then it is directed by Paul Verhoeven, the Dutch film-maker who back in the Nineties showed how brilliant he could be with Total Recall but then went on to court considerable controversy with both Basic Instinct and Showgirls.
Huppert plays Michele Leblanc, a high-flier who we will later learn has swapped book-publishing for creating video games with great success. But, as the film shockingly begins, she is slowly recovering from being violently raped in her home by a masked intruder.
She does everything we’re told a rape victim should not do – she tidies up the mess, washes her clothes, and has a long bath. Her bruises, she
tells her hopeless twentysomething son when he comes to dinner that evening, are a result of a fall from her bike. She doesn’t call the police. We understand, we think; she’s in shock. But we do not understand at all.
As Michele resumes her everyday working life, an extraordinary picture emerges of this divorced, middle-aged but sexually empowered woman. She’s having a very strange affair with her best friend and business partner’s husband, plays graphic footsie with her good-looking and married neighbour, and isn’t above snuggling up in bed with Anna (Anne Consigny), the aforementioned best friend and business partner, herself. And then, to top it all, we discover that her elderly father is in prison for… well, let’s just say he won’t be coming out soon.
If this were in English, particularly Hollywood English, it would be miles over the top, despite the presence of Huppert and a classy supporting cast, and despite Verhoeven’s obvious efforts to channel Alfred Hitchcock, as both she and we try to work out who her attacker might be.
But we haven’t even got close to the most controversial part, which sees the plot returning to the subject of rape in a way that, these days, few male filmmakers would dare to do.
But Huppert is excellent, and somehow the film does manage to be funny as well as deeply disturbing. And it will, I guarantee, prompt a heated postscreening debate.
There are one or two nice moments in The Time Of Their Lives (12A) which sees Pauline Collins playing an ageing, unhappily married woman who unwittingly finds herself responsible for taking Helen, a bad-tempered and entirely self-centred fading film star (Joan Collins, channelling… nope, can’t think who) to the funeral of an old director friend on the Île de Ré. What ensues is a slow-moving and not nearly funny enough road trip, with Collins J, left, overdoing the acerbity, while Collins P fails to strike up the convincing romantic chemistry with a game Franco Nero (he strips off for some skinny-dipping) that the plot requires. What charm there is arrives too little, too late.
Catfight (15A) ★★is one of the oddest films you’ll see all year, with Sandra Oh and Anne Heche as uptight Veronica and artistic Ashley, who used to be friends at college but who, when they meet up again as adults approaching middle age, can’t stop fighting. Literally. They slug it out for minute after bloody minute, leaving the loser so injured she spends the next two years in a truly life-changing coma. And when she wakes up, they do it all over again. There may be some fiendishly clever satire at work here (the film is firmly set in a fictionalised version of a Trump-era world), but the violence is so protracted and unpleasant, and the end result so lacking in laughs, that I soon gave up trying to find it.