[190 points / 20 votes]
“What is she thinking?”
“There's a reason the title of Elle translates to She or Her. In the end, it's all about what's going on in the head of Isabelle Huppert's character, Michèle Leblanc. In the very first scene, she gets raped, in such an archetypal way that it could easily have become abstract: violently, by a stranger in a ski-mask.
“Many viewers have expressed bafflement at how Michèle reacts. They don't understand why she simply cleans up the mess, takes a bath and orders sushi. An anonymous Oscar voter recently admitted that they didn't vote for Huppert: ‘I eliminated her because when you get attacked, beaten and raped, you're not the same person afterward, but she was, and I wanted to slap her to try to get a reaction out of her.’ Some called the movie a modern comedy of manners, which does not quite prepare you for the more brutal moments. One reviewer, taking the current trend of treating movies as puzzles to be solved entirely too far, even concocted a theory claiming that Michèle was the one who really committed the murders her father was convicted of.
“Before the film's release, director Paul Verhoeven predicted – with no small amount of glee – that Elle would enrage feminists. Some feminists indeed decried the film, claiming that it strengthens the sexist idea that women secretly want to be raped. Others, however, embraced it, seeing Huppert as a ‘post-feminist’ hero who subverts the traditional rape-revenge narrative in unsettling ways.
“Personally, I see Elle as a movie about a woman who is determined to regain control of her life in any way she can after someone wrests that control from her – but the beauty of the movie is that it allows for all kinds of interpretations, some of them contradictory, at the same time. In that sense it is very much of a piece with Verhoeven's earlier oeuvre: Starship Troopers and Robocop, which can be seen as either satires or endorsements of militarism; Showgirls, which is either cheap exploitation or, in the words of Jonathan Rosenbaum ‘one of the most vitriolic allegories about Hollywood and selling out ever made’, etc.
And Verhoeven's hand has only become steadier. Take the opening of Elle. We hear the rape first. And then the first shot shows … Michèle's gorgeous gray cat, who boredly takes in the scene in front of him and then walks away. ‘You couldn't at least have scratched him a little?’, Michèle asks the cat later, after she has a traumatic flashback in which the rape is shown start to finish. In this way, Verhoeven plays with our expectations: do we really want to see? Will that help us understand?
“Verhoeven is helped by a script (by David Birke, based on a book by Philippe Djian) full of complicating factors: the fact that Michèle's son is being abused by his fiancée, for instance, or that she herself is complicit in eroticising rape at her work at a video game company, where she orders underlings to make an attack in the game more orgasmic.
“His main ally, however, is Isabelle Huppert. She makes the movie – and this complex character – her own. This is also what makes the comments by the Oscar voter quotes above so short-sighted: Huppert's performance is all about her reactions. The fact that the movie ends up being surprisingly funny is due in large part to the reaction shots in which you can, from just a twitch of her mouth or an eye-roll, see exactly the contempt Michèle has for most of the world around her. And in the scenes in which she does show you a glimpse of the vulnerable woman under the hard, jaded shell, she makes you empathize with this woman who stubbornly resists empathy.
“I don't know if I'll rewatch Elle any time soon: the rape scenes aren't exactly easy to watch. But it's stayed with me since I watched it mid-2016, and I'm sure I'll be thinking about Elle – and elle – for a long time to come.” ~ Hedwig van Driel
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