ELLE C-
France Germany Belgium
(130 mi) 2016 ‘Scope
d: Paul Verhoeven
One sick fuck of a movie, one filled with disturbingly
violent, adolescent male sex fantasies that degrade women, creating an ugly,
highly exploitive, misogynistic atmosphere throughout, that is redeemed
somewhat by a stupefyingly dark performance by Isabelle Huppert that is so
over-the-top that it has comical elements, but honestly, despite all the
accolades, this is a mindlessly excessive provocation that will end up doing
more harm than good, as it normalizes criminal behavior, makes it blend in with
normal bourgeois society where the participants often can’t tell the
difference. While that should be
ridiculous, or hilarious, it is neither, as instead it sets a fatalistic tone
of gloom that pervades throughout the entire picture, as if saturated by toxic
air. When considering the source, Dutch
film director Paul Verhoeven, this is par for the course, as he seems to specialize
in morally transgressive material, usually crossing the line into distasteful
territory, where some obviously have no problem with it, but it remains
surprising how something this revoltingly emptyheaded can be dressed up in
arthouse production values, a stellar cast, and somehow the offensive material
is considered acceptable. Sorry, but it
falls into the crassly exploitive territory, where this is one of the overrated
films of the year, including Huppert’s performance, which is all show and
surface texture, more a display of the grotesque, as the film has little
redeeming value. The film shows a rape
scene not once, twice, or even three times, but four times, showcasing it for
exploitive purposes, then immediately shifting gears, turning to Huppert’s
blasé attitude afterwards, ordering sushi by phone, asking incredibly, “What is
a holiday roll?,” before somehow blending rape into normalized sexual relations
with people preferring a hard-edged, sadomasochistic kick in the head for their
pleasure. On top of this, the rape
victim (Huppert) owns a video-game company that saturates its graphic content
with increasingly violent, sadistic rape imagery that she criticizes at one
point as “too timid,” where we then have to deal with the startlingly shallow,
comic book personalities of the few insipid characters that create this kind of
junk for a living. Before long, all of
this has been mixed into an acceptable middle class attitude, where repeated
rape attacks go unreported to the police, where violent sex becomes normalized
in existing relationships, where the bottom line portrayal of men is so cliché
driven, as if all they have is a penis, and nothing else matters or defines
their character, as if this pervasive culture is contaminated by nothing but
sick and disgusting men, suggesting the world would be better off without them,
as who really needs them? End of story. And to further delineate a line of
demarcation, let’s call the picture ELLE (She).
The idea that one can tastefully trivialize and make a
mockery of rape culture in glossy arthouse cinema is simply a bad idea, as is
the idea of Huppert being an appropriate feminist response to violently
inflicted trauma, applying vigilante justice to her perpetrator, encouraging
him to do it without the mask on, as her character is too internally damaged to
be relatable or believable, but again remains in the comic book world of
delusion and adolescent fantasy, where the ridiculous nature of the film simply
can’t be taken seriously. Overall,
people are getting sucker punched with this one. Ostensibly a film about a middle-aged
businesswoman Michèle Leblanc (Huppert), seen at the opening getting brutally
raped in her own home by a man coming through the window in a ski mask dressed
all in black, leaving her battered and bloodied. But instead of going to the police, we learn
she distrusts and despises them due to her past history, as her father is a
convicted serial killer from the 1970’s who forced her, at the age of ten, to
assist in the burning of all their belongings afterwards, where she was
literally covered in ash when discovered by the police, becoming a subject of
harassment, with her father serving out the rest of his life in prison, though
he does have parole hearings every ten years.
Whenever her father’s infamous deeds appear in the news, Michèle is
dragged through the mud as well, with the public reviling her and expressing
their scorn. As if in protest to good
taste, Michèle along with her best friend Anna (Anne Consigny) are literary
book editors who develop a brutally violent video-game business catering to
teenage boys that exploits grotesque rape imagery, complete with ecstatic
moans, appealing to the lowest element of male fantasia and delusion, which, of
course, makes them highly successful, allowing her to live alone, along with
her cat, in a lavish home surrounded by dozens of open windows allowing the
intruder to appear. As if to place her
in a moral purgatory for which there is no escape, she is sleeping with her
best friend’s husband, Robert (Christian Berkel), while separated from her own,
Richard (Charles Berling), while raising an oblivious grown son who seems to
have more psychological issues than anyone else in the film, which of course
remain completely unaddressed. At the
same time, her elderly mother (Judith Magre) relies upon plastic surgery and
paid young male escorts to make her feel young, a habit Michèle finds revolting
and disgusting. While this rapist is on
the loose, he chooses to continue to send sick and twisted messages on her
phone and in her bed, all of which suggest she remains a target, along with
crude, mocking messages from within her own company, affixing her face to the
animated female character getting raped, which is sent to the working computers
of the entire staff.
Everything described thus far is simply the set-up, the
terms of the game from which Michèle must maneuver and operate in order to turn
the tables and regain a position of power, changing all the locks in her home,
buying a small axe and some toxic spray while taking target practice at a gun
range in order to protect herself, while Verhoeven has surrounded her with a
myriad of possible subjects, any one of which have a strong reason to hate her,
while also protruding into her dreams, where we see various revenge scenarios
playing out in her imagination. As for
Michèle herself, she thrives on other people’s discomfort, exploiting their
weaknesses, developing a casual disregard for conventional morality and has no
problem snooping into the computers of her coworkers searching for clues,
masturbating in a Buñuelian moment while watching a neighboring couple set up a
Nativity scene, reaching orgasm exactly when the lights come on, or launching
into a lengthy discourse on her own personal role in her father’s infamous
deeds that she relates dispassionately at a party to one of her neighbors,
Patrick (Laurent Lafitte), a stock trader with a beautiful but devoutly
Catholic wife, Rebecca (Virginie Efira), where she may as well be describing a
list of items on a shopping list, acting as if there is nothing inappropriate
about it while at the same time carefully gauging his response. Rather than offer any relevant comment on rape
or societal conventions, Verhoeven is content to see the world through the disfigured
life of Michèle, a tragic figure in every respect, considering what happened to
her at a young age, yet the director refuses to see her as a victim and instead
uses her psychological trauma as an excuse to explore all manner of human degradation,
including sexual humiliation or those who are aroused by being beaten and
raped, where he is trivializing human behavior, suggesting it’s all part of a wide-ranging
collection of bizarre sexual behavior, suggesting I’m OK if you’re OK, yet it’s
an excuse to display sadomasochistic male fantasies onscreen, suggesting what’s
taking place behind closed doors could be anything, aberrant or otherwise, suggesting
it’s all part of the human face. What
this adds to any discussion on human behavior is negligible, as it’s all been
done to much better effect by Olivier Assayas in Demonlover
(2002), one of the few artists to examine the detrimental effects of brutally
violating porn on the Internet, suggesting it goes beyond mere desensitizing
but is more about dehumanization, combining the deep-seeded ramifications of a
soulless Internet entity with the ruthless ambitions of capitalism. By comparison, Verhoeven’s revenge saga is
deceptively shallow and a major disappointment, working in the French language
for the first time in the director’s career, reduced to an offensive onslaught
of hateful and demeaning imagery, yet it is a rather faithful adaptation of the
2012 Philippe Djian novel Oh…, the
same writer who wrote Betty
Blue (37°2 Le Matin) (1986), an author who is extremely popular in Europe
but utterly overlooked in the United States, where there are few revelations anywhere
to be found that distinguish this from typical male sexist content, instead
becoming an opportunity to plaster the screen with exploitation genre,
fetishistic rape imagery that is meant to be shocking, all in the name of
entertainment. Perhaps Dr. Verhoeven
could move into pedophilia next.
