Isabelle Huppert Laurent Lafitte Charles Berling Judith Magre Anne Consigny
The movie opens with a black screen and the
sounds of a brutal rape underway, and the first image to appear is a cat with
expressive eyes. The victim Michèle
(Huppert) calmly gets up after the masked perpetrator leaves, sweeps up broken
glass and remnants of clothing, puts them in the trash, and goes to work. Michèle is a complicated woman—as are
all of Huppert’s characters. Our
next surprise is that she owns a video game business with her partner and best
friend Anna (consigny), overseeing a cohort of young male designers. She’s not very well liked, although in
some contexts we see her as very charming, even charismatic.
Ambivalence underlies all her
relationships—with the staff, with her ex-husband, her son and his girlfriend,
her mother, and a lover. She
clearly has a mean streak, and when she does things like seek out her
ex-husband’s current girlfriend, we wonder what she is about (this becomes more
clear across time). In the
meantime, she casually lets those around her know that she was raped, does not
want to go to the police, and proceeds to try to identify the intruder. She buys things to defend herself with
in case he returns, but does not install an alarm system. Further, when she identifies him, she
doesn’t take the appropriate action immediately, although she does have her own
plan.
We get hints from time to time about Michèle’s
murky past, which involved her father being imprisoned for life, and her own
picture as a child being published in the stories about his crime. Despite her mother’s urging her to
visit him, her response shows she is revolted by the thought. We never actually get a full
explanation about her history with him.
Huppert is stunning in her portrayal of the
character in Elle, and the film has
been submitted by France in the Best Foreign Film category. Paul Verhoevan (Basic Instinct, RoboCop, Black Book) directed it, based on Philippe
Djian’s novel, with screenplay by David Birke. My problem with the film is its lack of psychological
coherence, particularly in the Michèle character, despite Huppert’s excellent
performance. That is, her
motivations and actions are so contradictory, it becomes difficult to see them
embodied in a single person who is believable. She is secretive, yet thinks nothing of expressing her
emotions inappropriately at social gatherings. She engages in highly risky behaviors with surprising
people, but seems to be a very good businesswoman. She is calculating, yet overreacts sometimes with little
information or misinformation. Her
reasons for not contacting the police on several occasions are never
explicated.
The men surrounding Michèle tend to be no match
for her in the least. Her ex-husband
is something of an “effete intellectual”; her son doesn’t have the foggiest
notion of how to succeed in life and cannot handle his girlfriend; her lover is
demanding but shows no affection for her; and her father is serving a lifetime
jail sentence. I’m puzzled about
why the novelist and screenwriter (both male) portray all the male characters
in such a way. On the other hand,
they’ve also created a male who brutally rapes and batters a woman on more than
one occasion. Does this have
meaning, perhaps? Does it say
something about deeper issues between men and women from the authors’ point of
view?
Elle
is a fine production in many ways—most certainly Huppert’s performance—and it
keeps the viewer locked into the story.
The music by Anne Dudley and the cinematography of Stèphane Fontaine are
of fine artistic merit. But flaws
in the script and characterizations detract from it.
Brace yourself; this will puzzle you as
much as interest you.
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