News site of the year

Entertainment
  1. Home
  2. Entertainment
  3. Movies

Elle review: Isabelle Huppert shines in harrowing, complex thriller

★★★★

Michele Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert), the heroine of Paul Verhoeven's terrific new thriller, Elle, is not a typical movie heroine. A brisk, stylish Parisian, she runs a company that makes video games featuring tentacled monsters assaulting sexy young women, and has no qualms about instructing her staff to ramp things up to deliver the requisite "boner moment".

Up Next

Replay

Replay Video Icon
Player help icon

More Entertainment Videos

More videos

Trailer: ELLE

A successful businesswoman gets caught up in a game of cat and mouse as she tracks down the unknown man who raped her.

In her private life, she betrays her best friend (Anne Consigny), lies about crashing into the car of her ex-husband (Charles Berling), and quarrels with nearly everyone around her, especially her overbearing mother (Judith Magre) and wishy-washy adult son (Jonas Bloquet). Verhoeven, it's evident, likes and admires her very much.

What makes Michele impressive is her strength and independence, her refusal to be judged on any terms but her own. When she is raped by a masked assailant who breaks into her home, she's clearly shaken but refuses to panic. She has the necessary medical check-up, but refuses to go to the police, for reasons that gradually become understandable.

Isabelle Huppert and Laurent LaFitte in <i>Elle</i>.
Isabelle Huppert and Laurent LaFitte in Elle. Photo: Sony

While Michele may be tough, she's not made of stone: she finds her own way of dealing with trauma, a process that involves identifying and seeking out her attacker. Verhoeven is not a conventional feminist, and the film's relation to English-language discussions of "rape culture" is oblique at best – but the male characters are pointedly made unpleasant enough that the culprit could be almost any of them.

This droll, harrowing, remarkably complex movie represents the latest twist in an unique international career. Starting out in the Netherlands, Verhoeven became a Hollywood player in the 1980s and '90s, with a string of hits, including Robocop and Basic Instinct. In his first full-length feature in a decade, he has found an ideal collaborator in Huppert, a quintessentially French star who, like him, has a way of taking the perversity of human nature in her stride.

Advertisement

Huppert excels at playing repressed neurotics, such as the title character in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher – but Michele doesn't exactly fit this description. She is at least as forthright as she is mysterious, allowing Huppert to demonstrate her mastery of what the internet calls "resting bitch face": with a clear sense of her own identity, she dares the world to mess with her. At the same time, she's remarkably open-minded: many of the film's most intriguing moments take the form of pregnant pauses, where she confronts another character head-on and, briefly, anything seems possible.

Elle lacks the comic-book extravagance of Verhoeven's Hollywood blockbusters: the handheld camera work is nervous but rarely frantic, and the emphasis is on dialogue more than action, approximating the tone of "civilised" French art cinema (the American screenwriter, David Birke, worked from a novel by the French writer Philippe Djian). Still, Verhoeven has kept his love of wrong-footing his audience: encouraging uneasy laughs, forcing us to confront disturbing desires, or throwing us into situations that block any straightforward emotional response.

As a sophisticate trafficking in "base" pop culture, Michele has something in common with Verhoeven in his Hollywood years, a point he underlines with direct references to his gory science-fiction satire Starship Troopers. Linked to this is the accusation that looms over Michele throughout the story – that she is somehow complicit in violent acts committed by others, especially men.

In a way, she herself resembles a video-game character, repeating variations on the same gruelling scenario until she gets it right. These repetitions give the narrative an uncanny quality, reinforced by the spliced-in fragments of digital animation. As in another Verhoeven sci-fi blockbuster, Total Recall, we're led to ask how much is happening inside the protagonist's head – which in turn encourages us to ponder the element of dreamlike wish-fulfilment built into any fiction.

Typical of Verhoeven, too, is the use of religious imagery to subversive ends. The story takes place around Christmas, and a nativity scene set out by some pious neighbours becomes a crucial image – echoing the subplot centred on Michele's son, awaiting the day when his girlfriend (Alice Isaaz) gives birth. More broadly, the film could be understood as a gloss on a central Christian teaching: if someone harms you, should you offer them the other cheek? For Michele, as for Verhoeven, forgiveness is never quite that simple.

Advertisement