Movie Review—Elle

by Peter J. O’Connell

Elle. Released: Nov. 2016. Runtime: 130 mins. In French with English subtitles. MPAA Rating: R for violence involving sexual assault, disturbing sexual content, some grisly images, brief graphic nudity, and language.

A black cat passively watches an act of brutal violence taking place. It is the rape by a masked assailant of a middle-aged woman, Michele Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert), in her comfortable home in Paris. This is the shocking opening scene of the new French film Elle. What follows is, perhaps, even more shocking. After the rape Michele does not call the police or seek medical assistance. She simply cleans up herself and the mess in the house and resumes her life. Oh, yes, she says to her cat: “You didn’t have to claw his eyes out, but scratch him at least.” Continuing her surprising behavior, Michele, who is the head of a successful video game company, instructs her employees to make rape scenes in the games even more violent.

These offbeat developments seem to “derail” right at the start what could have been a rape-revenge thriller, such as those that flourished on U.S. screens in the last quarter of the last century. Instead, Elle starts taking on aspects of a characteristically Continental satire of relationships. Michele certainly lives in the midst of a complicated web of them. Some of her employees are alternately resentful of or infatuated with her. She feels detached from her slacker-type son, who is dominated by his girlfriend, who is pregnant—but maybe not by him. Michele has a contentious relationship with her mother, a cougar type. But Michele still has a warm relationship with her ex-husband, while she carries on an affair with the husband of Anna (Anne Consigny), her best friend and business partner. Oh, yes, when they were younger, there were flickers of lesbianism between Michele and Anna. And Michele is starting to develop an erotic obsession with a neighbor, Patrick (Laurent Lafitte), who is married to a devoutly religious woman.

But, actually, the rape-revenge thriller has not really been derailed. As the movie goes on, the thriller moves increasingly to the fore. Michele undertakes her own investigations, and commissions others, to try and find out the identity of her rapist. We learn that Michele’s paranoia about involvement with the police and press stems from her childhood when her father was imprisoned for a horrendous crime. Now her father is about to be released from prison, which is putting intense psychological pressure on Michele.  

Eventually, after more violence, Michele learns the identity of the rapist, but, contrary to what might be expected, that is not the end of Elle. Instead, it is the beginning of a Hitchcockian--and unexpectedly sado-masochistic—cat (!)-and-mouse game (!) between Michele and the attacker. It is a game in which Michele, entrepreneur of games, writes the rules. “Elle” means “she” in French, and Michele is a kind of idiosyncratic feminist heroine, refusing to accept in a conventional way the various roles thrust upon her by fate or society—whether as child, parent, wife, seductress, victim, revenger.

Director Verhoeven, a Dutchman noted for such U.S. films as RoboCop (1987), Basic Instinct (1992) and Starship Troopers (1997), expertly steers through the twists and turns of the story, with its mix of graphic violence and sexuality, subtle satire, and laser-like shafts of dark humor. Isabelle Huppert gives a compelling performance, steering through the twists and turns of her character’s personality with skill that exceeds expertise, perhaps achieving brilliance. The rest of the cast provides admirable support. The cinematography and other aspects of the production are, it could be said, like that cat at the beginning of the film: quietly attending upon the unquiet events transpiring.