Old Yorker

  • Elle

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paul Verhoeven (2016)

    Although most critics have praised Elle, there’s an unusual lack of consensus as to how to categorise it.  Peter Howell in the Toronto Star stresses the slipperiness of Paul Verhoeven’s film:  ‘Equal parts sexploitation drama, social satire and empowerment fantasy, Elle leaves us unsure of what we’re watching and how we should respond’.  The heading of Adam Mars-Jones’s TLS review, ‘She’s Complicated’, is a reference to the picture’s title and the woman to which that title refers – the protagonist Michèle (Isabelle Huppert), whose complexity Mars-Jones goes on to explore (and whose name he misspells throughout).  Anthony Lane in the New Yorker suggests, rather than Peter Howell’s disconcerting concoction, definite alternatives – the film is either ‘pernicious nonsense or an excruciating black comedy’.  I’ll go with the former:  Elle is meretricious but it’s dignified by a brilliant actress with a special gift for verisimilitude.

    Set in Paris in the present day,  Elle has been promoted as a high-end rape-revenge movie rather than as the more distinctive story it actually is.  Michèle Leblanc is a rape victim who:  tries seducing the married man-next-door; literally unmasks him as the rapist, when he attacks her a second time; and continues to pursue a sexual relationship with him, stimulated by the terrible danger of doing so.   This is, to put it mildly, unusual behaviour (though not so unusual in the world of Paul Verhoeven:  in his previous film, Black Book (2006), a Jewish woman fell in love with a Nazi officer).  What Michèle gets up to, however, is as nothing beside her backstory.  After the initial rape, she gets herself checked out at an STD clinic but refuses to report the crime to the police, with whom she wants nothing to do because of past dealings with them.  It turns out that Michèle is the daughter of a serial killer, and not just any serial killer.  One evening, forty years ago, her father murdered as many of the family’s neighbours’ children as possible.  He then enlisted the help of ten-year-old Michèle in making a bonfire and burning everything in the Leblancs’ home.  The media descended on the place and a press photographer snapped Michèle in the garden – her face smeared with ash, her expression hard to read but arguably excited.  The photograph became the defining image of the horrors, linking the child Michèle, in the public mind, with her father’s butchery.

    Michèle’s actions have to be explained by an extraordinary psychology:  if its playing-with-fire heroine was in any way a ‘typical’ woman the film would be summarily dismissed as a piece of flagrant and irresponsible misogyny.  It’s par for the course too, in a psychological thriller, that an adult character’s state of mind will result from shockingly influential events in their childhood.  Michèle’s past is so extravagantly exceptional, however, that it robs Elle of even basic plausibility, let alone wider social significance.  This might not have happened if Michèle’s father had abused her and/or other children, or carried out a Dunblane-type mass-murder, or even been a serial killer or rapist who took his time between attacks.  But the combination of (1) suburban berserk rampage, (2) slaughter of the innocents (including the pet animals of the children who were killed) and (3) Georges Leblanc’s roping in his child after the fact is luridly off the wall:  as a result, Michèle’s backstory can’t rise above the level of a sick joke.  I suspect it’s disbelief at what they’re seeing and hearing, tempered by the unarguable credibility of Isabelle Huppert’s presence, that is at the root of confounded critical responses to Elle – including the idea that it’s ‘wickedly funny’ (Kate Muir in the Times).  It’s as if the reviewers concerned feel sure the movie must be vicious crap but are baffled that it doesn’t seem that way. Of course it doesn’t, because Huppert dominates proceedings.

    Verhoeven and the scriptwriter David Birke milk the crimes of the father for attention-grabbing consequences, in character traits and plotting.  Georges Leblanc was a staunch-Catholic-cum-religious-maniac:  his daughter is therefore virulently anti-Christian; it comes in handy too that Rebecca (Virginie Efira), the wife of the rapist neighbour Patrick (Laurent Lafitte), is a practising Catholic.  Michèle’s enduring public notoriety is such that she’s confronted in a café by a woman (Marie Berto) who chucks the remains of a meal over her, cursing ‘you and your father’.  Michèle’s mother Irène (Judith Magre), whom her daughter loathes, also still receives abuse from members of the public:  comparing notes on this is about the only topic on which the two of them can exchange a civil word.  Irène, who worked as a nurse at the time of the murders, is now a kind of geriatric nymphomaniac; her latest boyfriend Ralph (Raphaël Lenglet) is a good half-century her junior.  In the final confrontation with Patrick, it’s Michèle’s son Vincent (Jonas Bloquet) who arrives in the nick of time to save his mother’s life and end Patrick’s, echoing the assistance Michèle gave her parent all those years ago.

    Verhoeven and Birke are relatively cavalier when it comes to explaining how Michèle has fared in her personal life across the intervening decades.  It’s unclear how her relationship with Vincent’s father, the inoffensive Richard Casamayou (Charles Berling), a struggling novelist, lasted as long as it did – without, it seems, the legacy of Michèle’s childhood trauma rearing its ugly head.  According to Anna (Anne Consigny), her long-time friend and business partner, all but one of the young workforce at the computer games company they run together hate Michèle but this appears to be down entirely to her ballbreaker management style.  It’s not evident that these members of the Google generation, unlike that complete stranger in the café, know about their boss’s past.

    Michèle’s line of work is, according to Adam Mars-Jones, one of the things David Birke has changed from Elle‘s source material, a 2012 novel called Oh … by Philippe Djian.  In the book, Michèle runs a literary agency that specialises in screenplays.  The visual possibilities of the switch to computer games are fully exploited, especially in supplying a foreshadowing précis of Michèle’s masochism.   The princess-like protagonist of a game currently in development is penetrated by a monster’s tentacle and likes it:  Michèle commands her development team to ensure the soundtrack fully conveys the screen woman’s orgasmic enjoyment of what’s being thrust inside her.  Michèle has no compunction about making money from animated sexual violence; or making a move on Patrick; or carrying on an affair with Anna’s husband Robert (Christian Berkel), although she seems (understandably) bored by him.  With these she’s-asking-for-it elements, Paul Verhoeven is himself flirting with disaster; here too, he’s protected by the firewall of Michèle’s bizarre uniqueness.

    Isabelle Huppert’s uniqueness is a different matter.  Elle opens with the dying sounds of the first rape and the sight of Michèle’s somewhat spooky cat watching proceedings.  Verhoeven then cuts to Michèle lying on the floor, amid shattered china, and her black-clad attacker taking his leave of her home.  When he’s gone, Michèle gets to her feet, finds a brush and shovel, and efficiently sweeps up the debris.  She takes a bath; her face doesn’t react to the vaginal blood in the water.   Huppert’s steely, businesslike self-control is so compelling that it cuts through the melodrama of Elle and she makes Michèle’s withering putdowns caustically amusing.  The plaudits she’s received for this performance (including a Golden Globe and a César, as well as several critics circle awards) are deserved.  Although Verhoeven’s film-making is glossily assured, Huppert is single-handedly responsible for Elle’s being taken seriously (the picture too has won prizes) – because she radiates seriousness of mind and purpose.  She’s made it possible for an often discerning female critic like Leslie Felperin, in The Hollywood Reporter, to praise Elle as ‘the most empowering “Rape Movie” ever made … one of the bravest, most honest and inspiring examinations of the subject ever put onscreen’.

    I assume Paul Verhoeven isn’t interested in a whodunit dimension, even before Patrick is confirmed as the rapist (about halfway through).  The viewer’s expectations of a whodunit treatment mean, however, that, at the start, you look at every new man who appears on screen as the potential culprit.  This doesn’t last for long.   It’s only technically the case that the computer games company staff, as Adam Mars-Jones claims, ‘enlarges the pool of (young, obsessive, fantasy-addicted) suspects, when it turns out that [Michèle]’s attacker is somehow keeping track of her’.  Only two of the employees are characterised:  it can’t be Kurt (Lucas Prisor), who’s too obviously hostile to Michèle; although it’s soon clear there must be more to the nerdy loser Kevin (Arthur Mazet) than meets the eye, it can’t be him either – he doesn’t have the physique of the tall, strongly-built man we saw fleeing in the opening scene.   Neither Richard nor Robert has enough personality for the revelation of a dark side to have any impact.  Patrick, the sleek, vaguely creepy financier and responsible neighbour, is really the only possible candidate in evidence.

    Although real-world probability clearly isn’t high on Verhoeven’s agenda either, it’s still galling that he attaches importance to something when it suits his immediate purpose then ignores it when it doesn’t (or vice versa).  An example is Rebecca’s Christianity and I don’t think this is Verhoeven making a satirical point about religious observance.  As she watches, through binoculars, Patrick help his pious wife put up Nativity decorations outside their house, Michèle masturbates (the fairy lights switch on as she reaches orgasm).  She follows this up with an invitation to the couple to attend her Christmas gathering.  Rebecca accepts with alacrity.  At the supper table, she nonpluses Michèle by asking to say grace; later in the evening, she much more tentatively asks if it’s OK to put television on to watch the Midnight Mass.  So it’s Christmas Eve:  just as you’re wondering why Rebecca didn’t excuse herself to go to Mass, the party breaks up abruptly:  Irène, after announcing her engagement to Ralf, collapses with a stroke.  (An irritated Michèle accompanies her mother to hospital, where Irène dies.  By the time Michèle goes back to Anna’s to spend what’s left of the night there, the film seems to have forgotten it’s Christmas.)  Rebecca’s New Year resolution is clearly to be more devout:  she goes on a pilgrimage to Santiago di Compostela, her convenient disappearance leaving Patrick and Michèle free to conduct their ‘game of cat and mouse’ – as IMDB euphemistically describes his insistence on accompanying sex with violence and her readiness to indulge him.

    Paul Verhoeven breezily sidesteps the question of how essential to Michèle’s sexual identity victimhood is:  we get no insight into her relationship with Richard or sense of what she expects from sex with Patrick before she finds out he’s the man who raped her.  Even after she has found out, she isn’t simply obsessed with him.  Michèle crashes her car and injures her leg:  she tries to phone Richard then Anna; they don’t pick up so she calls Patrick as third choice.  (Not calling an ambulance in the circumstances suggests an aversion to the emergency services that extends beyond the police.)  When Patrick arrives on the scene, he claims no more than a basic knowledge of first aid but the look in Michèle’s eyes makes clear that, in spite of her bloody leg wound, she has something different in mind.

    By the time the climactic confrontation with Patrick arrives, the Michèle who, in the days after the first rape, bought a pepper spray and took a shooting lesson, is a distant memory.  She owes her eventual survival entirely to the intervention of her hitherto hopeless son.  (Vincent is an unusual male character in the film:  he’s dominated by his exceedingly disagreeable girlfriend Josie (Alice Isaaz) – by, that is, a female other than the protagonist.)   Elle is gruesomely entertaining but it’s a nasty piece of work.  Anthony Lane’s New Yorker stablemate Richard Brody is among the minority of reviewers who’ve panned the movie.  I often disagree with Brody but he’s spot on when he says that, ‘Throughout the film, Verhoeven gives the impression of laughing up his sleeve at Michèle’s predicament as well as at her predilection, as if he were getting away with telling a sexist joke in a speech at a feminist convention’.

    10 March 2017

  • Certain Women

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kelly Reichardt (2016)

    Wendy and Lucy (2008) put me off seeing Kelly Reichardt’s next two films, Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Night Moves (2013).  Her continuingly rising reputation and the cast of her new picture, Certain Women, drew me back to her.  This is Reichardt’s sixth feature; like all but one of the previous five, it’s set in the American North West – this time in Montana rather than Oregon.  The locale – as depicted by Reichardt, the cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt and the production designer Anthony Gasparro – is remarkable chiefly for its large, melancholy rural landscapes and its fast-food outlets.  Certain Women is an adaptation of short stories in a collection called Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy (who is from Montana).  Reichardt, who wrote the screenplay, has changed Meloy’s title for the better, even though the adjective in it doesn’t really have a double meaning.  The main female characters, who vary in age, background and circumstances, all make up their mind to do something but their route to the decision is marked by anxious incertitude.

    In the first story, Laura Wells (Laura Dern), a middle-aged lawyer in the city of Livingston, has to deal with a particularly difficult client:  Fuller (Jared Harris), disabled as a result of a workplace injury, wants to sue his employers for negligence.  Laura has been telling him for eight months that, by virtue of accepting the company’s initial, nominal compensation payment, he’s relinquished the right to pursue a case against them.  She takes Fuller to get a second opinion from a personal injuries lawyer (Guy Boyd), who confirms exactly what Laura has been saying.  Because this legal opinion is also a male one, Fuller accepts it without argument.  Outside the lawyer’s office, he rows with his wife (Edelen McWilliams) and gets a lift back with Laura instead.  He tells her he wants to shoot his former employers and, that evening, holds one of the firm’s security guards (Joshua T Fonokalaki) at gunpoint.  The police contact Laura, who comes immediately to the scene and negotiates with Fuller.  He insists that she read aloud to him the entire contents of the company’s file on him.  Once she’s done this, Fuller lets the guard go and tells Laura to exit at the front of the building, pretending to the police that she has a gun at her back, while Fuller escapes via the rear  entrance.   Laura goes out as instructed but tells the police Fuller’s whereabouts.  They arrest him.  Admirers of Kelly Reichardt’s minimalism should be well satisfied by this piece.  The relatively uninitiated and/or lukewarm may see it as the work of someone who’s not just a minimalist but a monotonist.  Except for Fuller’s brief outburst in Laura’s car, the episode is resolutely low-key – even when the protagonist finds herself in what at first seems to be a potentially life-threatening situation.

    Laura Wells lives alone with her dog (which also accompanies her to work) but, in the opening scene of Certain Women, we see her at home, at the end of a lunch hour she’s spent in bed there with a man called Ryan Lewis (James Le Gros).  He turns up again in the second story, as the husband of its main character Gina (Michelle Williams).  The Lewises are building a second home in the country and spend their weekends on site, camping out in a tent.  They’re resentfully accompanied by their teenage daughter Guthrie (Sara Rodier).  On the way home one Sunday, Gina and Ryan call on Albert (René Auberjonois), an elderly man who has a load of sandstone outside his property.  Gina is keen to acquire the sandstone:  as Ryan explains to Albert, she wants ‘authentic’ materials for the house they want to build.  Gina broaches the subject with affable persistence but the negotiations seem to be going round in circles  – partly because Albert shows signs of dementia, rapidly forgetting what he’s just said, and partly because of Ryan’s more tentative approach, which involves repeatedly qualifying Gina’s remarks.   In her dealings both with Albert and with the sullenly uncooperative Guthrie, Gina is tensely determined to get things done and feels undermined by her husband’s craven diplomacy.  Ryan does remind Guthrie that Gina ‘works really hard’ and that they couldn’t manage without her; he tells Albert that Gina’s ‘the boss’.  Yet Guthrie treats her mother with bored contempt and Albert, throughout the sandstone discussions, makes eye contact exclusively with Ryan.  (It’s different when the subject isn’t man’s talk:  outside his house, Albert draws attention to the call of a bird and what it seems to be saying; Gina joins in with this and makes Albert chuckle.)   Vexing as Gina finds the visit, she and Ryan succeed in getting what they wanted:  in the last sequence of this section of Certain Women, the sandstone is being loaded onto a truck.  Albert gets up from the bed where he’s been watching a football game on TV (he has a fire and a cooler fan both going in the room) and goes to the window.  Gina catches sight of him looking out.  She waves but he doesn’t respond.  Kelly Reichardt gets across clearly the characters’ personalities and the dynamics between them, although the context of the story is sketchy.  (We get the impression that Gina is the family’s main breadwinner without knowing what she does for a living[1].)  Once again, the essential tone is unvarying.

    The central character in the film’s third episode is Jamie (Lily Gladstone), who’s in her late teens and works as a ranch hand.  It’s winter; Jamie is lodging on a farm outside an agricultural village called Belfry and looks after the horses stabled there.  One evening, with nothing better to do, she goes to the village and wanders into a sparsely-attended night class on school law.  She has no knowledge or understanding of the subject but she’s instantly taken with the teacher, Beth Travis (Kristen Stewart).   After the three others present have left, Beth and Jamie strike up a conversation and go to a nearby diner.  Beth has recently graduated from law school; she took on the Belfry assignment as a temporary insurance against getting failing to get anything else.  She now has a full-time job in a firm of lawyers in Livingston so doesn’t need, in either sense of the word, the twice-weekly, four-hour drive to Belfry and back; she doesn’t herself know much school law and has to keep mugging up on it.  Jamie immediately finds her emotional life revolving around the classes and going to the diner afterwards with Beth, who snatches a quick meal before heading off to Livingston.  One night, Jamie gives Beth a horseback lift to the diner and back to the car park.  When Jamie turns up for the next class, a new, male teacher explains that he’s replacing Beth for the remainder of the course.  Jamie drives to Livingston, walks round for a while, sleeps in her car overnight and goes looking for Beth the following morning.  She makes inquiries at the firm where Laura Wells works (we see Laura and her dog going upstairs to her office) – then drives to an address that Laura’s secretary (Ashlie Atkinson) gives her.  Jamie catches sight of Beth’s car arriving in the parking lot and gets out of her own.  Beth is astonished to see Jamie, who explains that she knew if she didn’t come she’d never see Beth again, and that she couldn’t let that happen.  Beth doesn’t respond.  Jamie gets back into her car and drives home to Belfry.  She’s so tired by now that she falls asleep at the wheel.  The vehicle plows into a field.

    This last part of Kelly Reichardt’s triptych takes Certain Women to a different, richer level.  (It made me, for the first time, want to see more of Reichardt’s work.)  There are several reasons for this.  Jamie’s unsophisticated transparency is a refreshing, easily likeable contrast to the tetchy dissimulation that dominates the first two stories.  The unfamiliarity of Lily Gladstone (a native Montanan of Native American heritage) reinforces that sense of refreshment.   Reichardt’s alternation between the largely unvarying routines at the stables and the night classes works very well – not least because the latter are for Jamie, from the moment that Beth turns up, anything but routine:  they’re reassuring and exciting.  There’s a potent sense of the whole of Jamie’s time between classes leading up to this all-important moment each Tuesday and Thursday evening.  There’s also a good, ambiguous texture to the stable scenes – in the sensory warmth, the physical beauty of the terrain and the way those things combine to make us more aware of Jamie’s solitude.  (On their first visit to the diner, Beth asks if she knows the others in the class and Jamie laughingly replies, ‘I don’t know anyone’.)  The three other regulars are all local teachers (Stephanie Campbell, Kilty Reidy and the distinctive Marceline Hugot).  Perhaps it’s a cheap shot that the only questions they ask Beth concern not student rights but teachers’ salaries and car parking entitlements.  But it’s welcome in a film not overflowing with humour.

    Reichardt crafts the short-lived relationship between Jamie and Beth in a way that’s generous to them both and poignant in effect.  The diner conversations mean everything to Jamie:  the most important person in her life is talking to her and only her.  Jamie takes this to mean something that it doesn’t mean to Beth, for whom it’s a relief just to be able to let off steam about how time-consuming the travel to Belfry is.  The first member of her family to go on to higher education, Beth doesn’t condescend to Jamie.  She also experiences the horseback ride as something extraordinary but only for as long as it lasts:  she still gets back in her car without further ado.  The gulf between the two women’s feelings is finely conveyed in the scenes following Jamie’s discovery that Beth has given up coming to Belfry.  (Reichardt makes the discovery more shocking by having the replacement teacher sit in the class seats until the others arrive and he goes to the front to introduce himself – Jamie assumes up to this point that he’s just a new student.)  On the nighttime drive into Livingston, Lily Gladstone is luminous.  She expresses Jamie’s desolation that she may not see Beth again yet there’s also a hint of Jamie’s delight in driving the route that Beth has been driving.  In their final meeting, Kristen Stewart’s paralysis is eloquent:  Beth can’t think what else to say to Jamie; it takes her a good few moments even to start moving away from her towards the office door.  Beth doesn’t mean to be unkind to Jamie; she’s just on a different wavelength.  Thanks to its emotional amplitude, this third section makes a stronger impression than either of the preceding parts does.  In retrospect, it seems altogether bigger than what’s gone before – a short novel, rather than a short story, on film.

    Certain Women ends with a postscript to each of its episodes.  Laura visits Fuller in prison.  He tells her his wife has left him for another man, who, to add insult to injury, is also behind bars.  Fuller pleads with Laura to write to him.   Gina’s and Ryan’s building project is progressing, with Gina  doing the work of feeding her husband, her daughter and the men helping with the house construction.  Jamie appears briefly, still looking after the horses with not another human being in sight.  The threefold epilogue doesn’t amount to much more than underlining what’s happened previously; the minor intersections between stories – Ryan appearing briefly in the Laura part, Laura even more briefly in the Jamie-Beth part – have a similarly perfunctory feel.  The males in the film are all, in different ways, pathetic.  Fuller is floundering in desperate needfulness.  Ryan cheats on his wife and verges on the inane.  Albert is losing his mind.  The Jamie-Beth story prospers with barely a male in evidence though the replacement teacher (Gabriel Clark) manages to sound vaguely misogynist and egocentric even with just his couple of lines.  He tells the students that ‘the travelling seems to have been too much for Ms Travis’ and that he’s recently divorced, as if therefore deserving of sympathy.

    There are links between the main female characters too – Laura and Gina share resentment of being made to feel ‘the bad guy’, and of the unwarranted guilty conscience that results – but Kelly Reichardt’s women are substantial individuals.  In spite of my reservations about the first two thirds of Certain Women, Laura Dern and Michelle Williams are both excellent.  (The whole cast is strong, men as well as women.)  Williams expertly suggests that Gina’s control freakery and admirable determination are two sides of the same coin – that the edgy, forced quality of her friendliness, as she tries to negotiate with Albert, is the only way Gina can do business.  Laura Dern’s face continually registers then masks frustration or unease.  The one time Laura Wells seems relaxed is when she’s lying on her sofa watching television, with her dog beside her. (It’s a brief respite: the phone then rings, to summon her to Fuller’s hostage-taking.)  The Michelle Williams section of Certain Women is the only episode without a significant canine presence but the film is dedicated to Kelly Reichardt’s own late dog, Lucy, who co-starred with Williams in Wendy and Lucy.

    9 March 2017

    [1] According to Sight & Sound (March 2017), Gina is an estate agent.

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