Review: Elle

Elle (18)

France/Germany/Belgium 131 mins Subtitles Dir: Paul Verhoeven  Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Anne Consigny, Laurent Lafitte, Judith Magre, Charles Berling, Jonas Bloquet

Just when you thought Basic Instinct and – titter! – Showgirls director Paul Verhoeven had hung up his heavily stained transgressive erotic thriller pants for good, back he roars with this magnificently subversive, taboo-busting slice of arthouse sexploitation. Gleefully calculated to outrage the easily offended, whose indignant and self-righteous ranks seem to swell with each passing year, Elle boasts a brilliant, justly Oscar nominated performance by the great Isabelle Huppert as a character who is, in the argot of our times, ‘problematic’.

It opens innocently enough with a close up of an adorable, bright-eyed pussy cat entranced by some offscreen action. Turns out that the beast is watching what initially sounds like rough consensual sex but is in fact the brutal rape of a woman by an intruder wearing a ski mask. Once the assailant has departed, she quietly cleans up the ornaments that have been shattered in the fracas; disposes of the clothes she was wearing; soaks herself in a warm bath, observing the bloodstained foam with an inscrutable expression; and carries on with her life as though nothing has happened. We then learn that she’s Michele Leblanc, formidable late-fiftysomething boss of a successful Parisian video games company, who hectors her minions about the “insufficient orgasmic convulsions” in their latest product’s scenes of sexualised violence. She’s also conducting an affair with her best friend’s (Consigny) husband, which is interrupted only briefly by the assault.

In a typically matter of fact way, Michele goes for an STD test, arms herself with an axe and pepper spray, and sets about trying to identify the attacker who has now started to stalk her. But this is no run-of-the-mill rape revenge thriller serving up cheap titillation with a cynical veneer of feminism. Indeed, the literal unmasking of the rapist is a minor plot point and his identity comes as no great surprise. Verhoeven takes a much riskier approach with a feast of high-wire perversity that conflates pleasure and pain, rejects all notions of victimhood and doesn’t shy away from toying with dangerous ideas. Is Michele in some way culpable for the rape by making a living out of images of women being brutalised? More troublingly, does her apparent arousal make her complicit in it?

Adapted from a novel by Betty Blue writer Philippe Dijan, David Birke’s witty screenplay feels rather like Michael Haneke with an attack of the giggles. It certainly delivers plenty of pleasingly inappropriate pitch-black humour, much of this deriving from a depiction of Michele’s family that seems as though it belongs in classic French farce. Her mum (Magre) is a heavily botoxed old trout who blows her wealth on toyboys, while the men are all wholly ineffectual – apart from dad, who’s described as a monster and turns out to be just that. Ex-hubby Richard (Berling) is a whiny failed novelist and the couple’s twentysomething son Vincent (Bloquet), whom Michele describes witheringly but accurately as “a big lout with nothing special about him”, is emasculated by his promiscuous, demanding, heavily pregnant princess of a girlfriend. You want an excruciating Christmas dinner and two darkly hilarious hospital sequences? You gottem.

It’s all beautifully shot by Jacques Audiard’s regular DP Stéphane Fontaine and benefits from a suspenseful, knowingly Herrmann-esque score by Anne Dudley. But would Verhoeven have got away with all this without Huppert? Raising his red rag, he’s cheekily observed that “no American actress would ever take on such an amoral movie” and may well be right. Radiating her trademark froideur, Huppert delivers yet another stunning performance as the imperious, controlling Michele, who chooses to tell her friends about the rape before dinner in a restaurant and then shuts down the conversation by remarking with an air of finality: “It’s over. Doesn’t need talking about now”. If you’d hoped never again to see her reach for a sharp object after The Piano Teacher, this is probably not the artporn outrage for you, but she remains on mesmerisingly flinty form throughout, anchoring Verhoeven’s schlockier sensibilities when they’re given free rein as the film careers towards its preposterous denouement. They make such a perfect team that it’s a surprise they didn’t get together earlier. Oh, and she should have got that Oscar.