In a sentenceIsabelle Huppert makes everyone else look dangerously unprepared for a conversation
After a rape, Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) tries to keep control of her life while the identity of her attacker remains unknown. Around her are Patrick (Laurent Lafitte), Anna (Anne Consigny) and Richard (Charles Berling), with sexual entanglements and difficult relationships continuing to demand her attention. She responds to danger with mockery and pepper spray, giving little away about how the assault has affected her. Her determination to pursue pleasure and exercise authority unsettles any simple account of what she needs. As she negotiates the people around her, the threat to her safety remains.
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Paul Verhoeven’s Elle is a disturbing, often funny thriller with an exceptional Isabelle Huppert performance. Its elaborate plotting sometimes tries too hard, but we recommend it to those prepared for brutal sexual violence.
Paul Verhoeven’s Elle is a strong, troubling thriller that gives its central woman more freedom than its elaborate plot sometimes allows. After Michèle is raped, we might expect the familiar business of pursuit and punishment. Her continuing appetite for pleasure and control receives just as much attention. This is risky material, and Isabelle Huppert makes it work by refusing to play Michèle as somebody whose behaviour must explain how survivors ought to behave.
We were horrified by the assault. Its brutality makes the subsequent comedy uncomfortable, particularly when the film invites us to enjoy Michèle’s capacity for mockery. The performance does not offer a reassuring change of manner to announce that laughter is now permitted. She can be funny, cruel and hurt without arranging those feelings into separate scenes for our convenience. We are asked to keep watching someone whose response cannot be reduced to the crime committed against her.
Isabelle Huppert is especially good at making authority look like a daily habit. Michèle’s desire to control what other people know about her feels intelligible even when her decisions remain difficult to understand. The pleasure she takes in power comes through as clearly as the effort required to maintain it. There is enough humour in the performance to make her company enjoyable, and enough severity to discourage any wish to be her friend. Her contradictory behaviour never feels like an invitation to stop taking her seriously.
Stéphane Fontaine’s cinematography and Laurent Ott’s production design give the social comedy a polish that feels uncomfortable beside the violence. That civilised appearance works because the characters’ manners can remain intact while their behaviour grows ugly. Job ter Burg’s editing keeps the switches between comedy and suspense brisk, denying us much time to settle into either. Anne Dudley’s score helps sustain the threat, although the uncertainty in the central performance is more unsettling than the recognisable thriller cues. The craft supports the changes of tone without making them comfortable.
The weakness lies in David Birke’s screenplay, which sometimes piles complication onto Michèle as though another contradiction will make her more interesting. The tangled relationships are often entertaining, but there are stretches when the plotting seems too pleased with its ability to surprise us. We begin to notice how much has been arranged to keep this woman difficult to explain. Isabelle Huppert does not overplay the material, which helps, but her precision cannot make every development feel equally plausible.
Against the rape-revenge thriller’s usual promise of a satisfying reckoning, the attention paid to Michèle’s continuing social and sexual life is valuable. She is allowed to want things that do not help an audience approve of her. Nothing about those desires makes the assault less violent, and nothing about being assaulted obliges her to become kinder. The film is persuasive when it trusts us to understand that. It becomes harder to defend when another provocation threatens to crowd out the woman we have been watching.
We would not offer this as a reassuring film about surviving violence, and its humour does not soften what is shown. Nor should Michèle be made to stand for anyone beyond herself. See it for Isabelle Huppert, and allow some time afterwards to disagree about the script.
Most critics respond warmly to Elle, with praise concentrated on Isabelle Huppert’s performance as a woman whose response to rape resists familiar expectations. The reviews repeatedly credit her precision, humour and complexity with holding together Paul Verhoeven’s shifts between psychological suspense, black comedy and social satire. Most find the film disturbing but also unexpectedly funny, and see its handling of desire, power and victimhood as a substantial challenge to the conventions of the rape-revenge thriller.
The disagreement concerns what those provocations achieve, with a broad positive majority and a small but sharply dissenting minority. The Guardian remains conflicted about the film while admiring Huppert’s resolve and commanding presence. The New Yorker rejects the transgressions as false, arguing that the central character becomes a collection of pathological traits rather than a convincing woman acting on desire; it also finds Huppert’s precise performance less distinctive than most critics do.
The review praises the film as mad, wild, provocative, funny, dark and determined. It singles out Isabelle Huppert's superb performance as a chilled, sexual, driven woman.
Read the full review →The critic calls the film a challenging yet entertaining black comedy that is laugh-out-loud funny and indulges its kinks through a deviously plotted and subversive narrative. It singles out Huppert's marvelous, intuitive performance as one of the best of her career for creating a caustic, contradictory anti-victim who relishes pleasure and power.
Read the full review →The critic highlights Isabelle Huppert's multifaceted, mercurial performance as the key to making the provocative story work, portraying a woman who refuses to be defined or devastated by trauma and takes back agency in surprising ways. It is intensely troubling yet fiercely feminist, shocking, surprisingly funny, and compelling.
Read the full review →The critic calls it an unmissable shocker driven by Isabelle Huppert's stupendous, charismatic performance that embodies the entire film, showing a formidable woman who refuses to be a victim or defined by others after a brutal rape. The story surprises and thrills while exploring her strength of will and insolence in a provocative French context.
Read the full review →Verhoeven's film is a gripping whodunit and wickedly droll comedy of manners that confronts the audience with a brutal assault and then delivers psychological suspense. Isabelle Huppert delivers a masterful, enthralling performance that upholds and improves her reputation.
Read the full review →The critic finds it suspenseful and unsettling from start to finish, an audacious and irony-laced tale with a tour de force performance from Huppert that is just plain fun to watch.
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The Piano TeacherAnother unsettling Isabelle Huppert performance, with desire examined without much reassurance.
La Cérémonie · not reviewed yetDomestic politeness conceals hostility in a thriller that takes class seriously.
The Headless Woman · not reviewed yetA woman’s uncertain recollection turns ordinary encounters into sources of mounting unease.
The HandmaidenSex, deception and shifting power, with more pleasure in the plotting.
In the Cut · not reviewed yetA murder investigation entangles desire and fear without making either comfortable.
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