Elle – movie review

Isabelle Huppert shines in the lead role of Elle, a sordid, twisted tale of lust and brutality.

Michèle (Huppert) seems indestructible. Head of a leading video game company, she brings the same ruthless attitude to her love life as to business. Being attacked in her home by an unknown assailant changes Michèle’s life forever. She replays the event in her mind over and over, but she doesn’t react the way one might expect. Fear and repulsion are replaced by curiosity. She tracks down the masked man responsible and both are drawn into a curious and thrilling game – one that at any moment may spiral out of control, if it hasn’t already.

Paul Verhoeven directs a screenplay by David Birke, based upon the novel Oh … by Philippe Djian. The idea for the movie came from producer Saïd Ben Saïd, who contacted Verhoeven and sent him Djian’s novel, which he clearly found appealing. At one stage the plan was to shoot Elle in the US, but Verhoeven says it was tricky, artistically as well as financially.

“We realised that no American actress would ever take on such an amoral movie,” Verhoeven says. In hindsight, the director says he realises now that he could never have made the movie in the US with the level of “authenticity” that it has. He points out that it is a story and not real life, nor a philosophical view of women. “This particular woman acts that way, which doesn’t mean that all women will or should act that way.”

Verhoeven never looks to explain Michèle’s behavior. That is up to us – the audience – to determine, if we so choose. For instance, was it Michèle’s traumatic experiences as a child that resulted in the way she is and acts?

Verhoeven is deliberately ambiguous in Elle, perpetually so. Events just happen without a build up and then Michèle and the others move on. He had previously employed that technique, particularly in Total Recall, which combined dream and reality. And, as Verhoeven puts it, “at the end (of Elle), you’re not sure what to think. It’s unclear. I like keeping options open.” Whereas in Djian’s novel Michèle works in movies, in the film Michèle is in the violent and sexually perverse video games business. As Huppert sees it, that blend of sex and violence is “like an allegorical echo of the movie’s whole story”.

I found it intriguing, perplexing and deeply disturbing. The darkness was immediately apparent from the brutality of the first scene.

Isabelle Huppert is mesmerising. She single-handedly makes the movie the quality product that it is. Gradually, we are introduced to elements of the lead character and her past. She is intelligent and combative. She has an impoverished ex-husband who likes younger women. She fights with and disagrees with the choices made by her mother, who is attracted to younger men. She is exasperated by her son, who has chosen to move in with a girlfriend she doesn’t approve of, but she has to fork out the money to enable that to happen. She has a mass murderer for a father who has been imprisoned for more than 30 years for what he did. So, Michèle would be a psychiatrist’s dream, but she stands alone strong and resilient.

While clearly not everyone’s cup of tea, this is a degenerate cocktail that has the ability to intoxicate, not the least because it is so much at the edge of what one might term acceptable or appropriate behaviour. Rated MA, Elle scores a 7½ to 8 out of 10.

Director: Paul Verhoeven
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Anne Consigny, Laurent Lafitte
Release Date: 27 October 2016
Rating: MA 15+

Alex First