04. Elle

04. ELLE

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Release date: October 27, 2016

In another year of decidedly bland mainstream cinematic output, the return of Dutch director and master provocateur Paul Verhoeven, after a 10-year absence, could not have come any sooner. He brought us Elle, a dark, brilliant and decidedly twisted black comedy that the millennial snowflake generation was sure to find a tough morsel to swallow.

Elle begins in the most confronting of ways. Our protagonist Michele, played by Isabelle Huppert at the height of her powers, is being raped. The horrific sounds of the attack are played out on the face of her cat, which coldly watches on. Then we see her attacker, a man dressed in black, wearing a face mask, calmly remove himself from Michele and leave.

It’s Michele’s response to this most brutal of assaults that makes Verhoeven’s first film since 2006’s Black Book, such an endlessly fascinating and challenging movie. Following her assault, Michele cleans her house, bathes, gets an STD check from her doctor and then does not report the rape to the police. The reasons for this become clear later on.

But what is also evident is that Michele has no intention of allowing the attack to disrupt the carefully controlled chaos of her busy and successful life. Michele and her friend Anna (Anne Consigny) run a video game development company, whose specialty is particularly sexual and violent fantasy titles. Michele navigates her relationships with men, an ex-husband, a lover and a son, with coldly precise aplomb. Michele has no room in her life to be a victim.
Verhoeven, now 78, initially wanted to shoot Elle in Boston, with a host of major actresses attached, from Nicole Kidman to Sharon Stone, Diane Lane and Marion Cotillard, but then decided to move the production to France. He learned French to communicate with the cast and crew, perhaps because he knew a US studio might prevent him from depicting this character and story in such an unflinching manner. It appears the decision was a correct one.

Huppert delivered the best performance by any actress in 2016 and was subsequently nominated for a Golden Globe. If there remains discerning voters in the Academy, then we should see her nominated for an Oscar too. Elle is France’s entry in the Best Foreign Language Film category – and it surely deserves to win. A riveting melodrama.