Isabelle Huppert's rape non-victim makes Elle a perversely compulsive film | Isabelle Huppert
Film blogIsabelle Huppert This article is more than 7 years oldIsabelle Huppert's rape non-victim makes Elle a perversely compulsive film
This article is more than 7 years oldPaul Verhoeven’s daring new black comedy offers up a jarring narrative of sexual abuse without empowerment or revenge. Spoilers ahead
A woman is raped as Elle opens – although, who knows, for certain, at first: with the screen kept black for a few disorienting beats, it is momentarily impossible to distinguish between the sounds of frenzied sexual consent or assault, and only when image is added to audio does context emerge. Well, apparent context, anyway: Michèle (Isabelle Huppert), a middle-aged, divorced French businesswoman, is being forcibly penetrated, on the floor of her own refined Parisian home, by a man in a ski mask. With Dutch film-maker Paul Verhoeven at the helm of this slippery psychological drama, operating with peak kinetic bluntness after a long career that includes Basic Instinct, Showgirls and Robocop, the struggle is staged to deliver a disturbing jolt, and the audience is primed to be sympathetically horrified. The very thought of rape, after all, evokes primal reactions of moral outrage in audiences. We demand cinematic consequence for the crime, and emotional compensation for the victim – and for us, the traumatized moviegoers.
But in the aftermath of this particular rape, when the attacker runs away, Michèle calmly locks the door, tidies the room, and takes a bath. A blip of blood bubbles up in the tub from between her legs, evocative of Huppert’s self-mutilating bathroom activities 15 years ago as a different kind of complicated woman in Michael Haneke’s kinky The Piano Teacher. Later, immaculately chic at a restaurant, she relays the news of her attack to her dinner companions without a blink or apparent distress before turning her attention to the menu, perturbing the others at the table: her ex-husband, her best friend and business partner (in an animation company that, almost too pointedly, makes violent, sexualized video games); and her best friend’s husband, with whom Michèle is having a coldly physical affair.
Later still, she replays the rape in variations that blur revenge and arousal. She also tracks the rapist – and an intense (and intensely inscrutable) relationship evolves. Oh, and among the loaded details, Michèle is the daughter of an oppressively religious father, now old and rotting in prison for his crimes as a mass murderer of children; in her childhood she was ensnared by her father’s “pious” evil. She is the mother of a feckless loser of an adult son bullied by his brazenly materialistic girlfriend. Her own mother is a vain, over-Botoxed handful with a pathetic attraction to young men.
What to make of such a woman raped? Of such a family of people behaving so badly? Of ghastly parents and disappointing children? What to make of Michèle’s imperious demand for more and more sexual and violent imagery from the young male animators in her employ? Of her submissive role in the affair with her best friend’s husband? Of all her messy, in-your-face contradictions?
And then there are the funny bits – in a dark drama about a heinous crime entirely resistant to categorization, or moral gentility. Look elsewhere for compassionate support of female victimhood suitable to the new Trump regime. Don’t bother to sift through this snaky, obstreperous movie, based on the 2012 French novel Oh … by Philippe Dijan and written by American screenwriter David Birke, for actions that can be cited as gestures of female empowerment. Certainly Verhoeven has no use for such niceties – which may be one reason why the project could not get off the ground in its original conception as an American production. There is a particular challenge to finding an American movie star of stature to play so impenetrable and even off-putting an invented woman. And Elle offers no guidelines, no safety rails, and no redeeming characteristics with which to justify a drama about a woman who seems so unscarred by her experience – and, indeed, sometimes so excited by rough sex.
Elle says: go have your tut-tutting conversations about the male gaze, and representations of women, and women’s critical voices, and no-means-no, and #notokay, and grab-her-by-the-pussy, and yadda yadda yadda elsewhere. Elle takes a man’s pitiless novel and even more provocative screenplay about a raped woman, in a movie directed by the wily button-pushing director dude who made the gender-wars debate classics Basic Instinct and Showgirls, and says: how do you like them apples?
Hillary help me, I feast on the movie’s respite from bearing any message besides the announcement that here she is. This particular woman. Take her or leave her. And as it turns out, Huppert is so superbly the woman for the job that it is impossible to imagine the movie’s dark magnetism without her. Over the course of her great film and theatrical career, the distinctive star never met a perverse character she couldn’t wrench into believable shape and substance. With her talent for simultaneously projecting heat and coldness, reserve and appetite, and blessed with a natural physical projection of feminine self-containment and mystery, Huppert has had her pick of particularly vivid, psychologically complex female characters over the course of her award-laden 40-year career.
The rape non-victim Michèle may just be the apotheosis of Huppertian amoral ambiguity and contradictory impulses. And the star inhabits the psyche of the woman at the center of this exhilaratingly loaded sexual fairytale with the full confidence and radiance of the 63-year-old real-life woman she is.
I’m with her.
- Elle is released in the US on 11 November and in the UK on 10 March
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