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
