Elle

An astonishingly excellent film with Isabelle Huppert.

good

Isabelle Huppert, extraordinary and exquisite actress! Deserved awards for best actress and best foreign film in the Golden Globes.

This 2016 movie was a good entertainment, but not as great as I expected. Be careful of the critics reviews, as usual. I thought it was easy to suspect the bad guy sooner in the development of the story when it was not the buy guy yet. Huppert is filling her role which, as always with her, is deeply tormented. This noir movie, based on Philippe Djians Oh is a Germano-French collaboration directed by the well-known and also very tormented Verhoeven. Michele is a separated woman who, with her best friend, is at the head of a video game company. She seems to like to control everybodys life, from her mother to her ex, though her son and his girlfriend, without forgetting her team; but one day...

Agreed. Its dark and the second half of the movie will be very uncomfortable. At some points its almost comical - the gale force Parisian winds, the boiler room, and the black cat.

Woman is raped in her home. The scene is played over and over. She refuses to go to the police as she has a bad history with the police--her father is a mass murder who killed all her neighbors, their kids, and their pets when she was a little girl. In fact the way she robotically goes about her life afterwards you wouldnt think she thought much about it. I think one of her friends even comments on that. In her half-hearted attempt to find out who it is (she thinks it is a young guy who works for her) she continues having an affaire with her best friend and company co-owners husband; she fondles, flirts, and even masturbates (while watching him out the window) to/with her devout Christian neighbors husband; pays for her learning disabled and fast food working sons apartment with his girlfriend who obviously had a baby by someone other than him (the baby comes out black); and gets jealous of her ex-husbands new young Yoga instructor girlfriend. In short, the heroine in this movie, along with the supporting characters, are just vile, immoral, disgusting people. They are damaged in one way or another. They arent redeemed in the end. There is nothing I can relate to in any of them. And as usual with this type of movie, including it being French, there are the cold callous moments in regards to sex and relationships that isnt even human. And what is even more disgusting is that the main character finds out who her rapist is and continues to sleep with him (or let him abuse her depending upon how you look at it). She tells him that their relationship is diseased and twisted when she comes home from a party she invited him to( weirdo). That is, she does this until her son comes home and bashes the rapist/lovers head in (which you get to see in graphic detail) when the son thinks his mom is being assaulted again, which she is not, again, depending upon the definition of depravity you apply to this garbage. There is the usual Hollywood mocking of Christians in the movie and portraying them as weird and demented, right up to the end scene. The woman even owns one of those violent computer game companies. We, the audience, have the pleasure of watching violent scenes from that. Just a disaster of a movie that starts and goes no where.

Weird movie

Isabelle Huppert is amazing in a story that is provocatively contrived yet with a grain of truth at its base. What starts out like some Hollywood revenge fantasy veers into workplace drama, deranged family farce and of course, sexual transgression. Its got all the earmarks of classic Verhoeven: venal men, strong, if bare breasted women, perverse twists, taboo toppling. the director seems to take especial glee in humiliating just about every character in some way or another. Its ultimately a pitch black comedy, with Huppert doing her best Buster Keaton: she takes a licking and pops back up with a sort of aggressive impassivity. It revels in going to extremes, but like a Lynch, Almodovar or Cronenberg movie makes weird sense on its own terms. The story is riffing on the phenomenon of how some victims of trauma come to find comfort, even pleasure in ritualized violence, BDSM, in this case, rape play. Hupperts character is the daughter of a notorious mass murderer grown up to be the CEO of a company that makes hyper violent video games. She seeks to dominate all around her, with mixed success, when a sexual assault puts her on a path of self discovery and acceptance. Really. Less in line with the directors more tepidly risque Hollywood output, Elle hearkens back to the giddy perversity of the The 4th Man. Which makes it kind of a homecoming for Verhoeven, finally returning to making the kind of movies he was clearly put on this earth to do.

This is a watchable movie. Very well filmed, wonderful set design. It has an intriguing plot that isnt predictable, and it doesnt lag. Great cast.

Director Paul Verhoeven is famous for his provocative films, often combining sex, violence and psychological power play. Actress Isabelle Huppert is famous for her demanding roles, often playing powerful women with an obsession for sex and/or violence. Put the two together and you can guess what you get. Elles lead character, Michèle, is a woman who owns a video game company, specializing in games filled with extreme sex and violence. She casually shares her bed with her best friends husband. She masturbates watching the neighbour unloading the trunk of his car. Her father is a convicted serial killer. Oh, and she doesnt seem to mind getting raped. At least, thats the impression after the very first scene. After having been attacked and violently raped, she doesnt call the police of even a friend, but a fast food restaurant, ordering something to eat. The film explores not only Michèles relationship with her rapist, whose identity is established after about two thirds of the film, but also the men and women in her immediate circle. They all have their problems and peculiarities, and Michèle seems to pull all their strings as a hard, cold woman, superbly mastering her feelings and emotions. For the viewer, it takes some effort to understand all the different relationships, and even more to grasp Michèles behaviour. The only explanation Verhoeven offers, is her troubled youth as the daughter of a serial killer. In my opinion, the film suffers from an overload of characters with psychological difficulties. Theres a mother hiring a gigolo because she cant accept getting older, theres a son clinging to a dominating girlfriend, a neighbour with a wife obsessed with religion, an employee playing a dirty trick on Michèle, and so on. Personally, I found it a bit too much. The one thing that stands out in this film, is Isabelle Hupperts acting. Any other actress could easily have made Michèles character unbelievable. But Hupperts utter detachment from any form of sensitivity makes the part completely convincing.