Elle (2016, drama)
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Starring: Isabelle Huppert
Rotten Tomatoes: 88%
Elle is the latest film from legendary Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Robocop, Blackbook) and I watched it based on the strength of his reputation, not knowing what it was about. It's about a woman, Michelle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) who is raped and has to deal with the consequences of it.
This is a great movie, where Verhoeven lives up to his reputation as a subversive director who forces the viewer to confront his own hypocrisies and moral failings. There's a lot of critique of "rape culture" in this movie, of a lot of tropes we've seen in the media just in the past few years, this is a very well thought out film.
The most obvious one is that Michelle is not the "ideal victim". Her life has been difficult and she has been let down by three generations of people. Among those older, both her parents let her down, she has a difficult relationship with both, and her father is a famous murderer, with the police having immortalized her as the crazy daughter due to one decontextualized photo. Her own genration has let her down, she had to break up with her ex boyfriend because he hit her. Her son has let her down, she feels he is not amounting to anything much at all, she doesn't like his girlfriend either.
She copes, I think, by trying to be the psychopath the media portray her as, but it doesn't work. She actually does care about people. She buys pepper spray for self defense ... but she also learns how to treat its injuries. She cheats with her friend's husband, but she hates it more and more as time goes on. Her attempted coping may make her look like "a *****" to some, but it's a shield and a mask. It does come to at a cost later on, when she feels she cannot go to police.
Video games also play a role. She works for a video game manufacturer, an industry which has been the sight of controversy in the past few years due to portrayals of violence against women. This is very explicit in the movie, in a gratuitous way that you can't miss it. The movie doesn't moralize on the point at all, it just makes it clear and unambiguous how video game design is an accelerant to rape culture.
I didn't know what this movie would be about, and I didn't feel like seeing another rape-related movie after watching Room, Confirmation, and Braveheart on the plane a few weeks ago. However this was very well done, it was about the Michelle's journey, how she deals with what happens to her in the context of her own life and personhood.
Grade: A
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Starring: Isabelle Huppert
Rotten Tomatoes: 88%
Elle is the latest film from legendary Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Robocop, Blackbook) and I watched it based on the strength of his reputation, not knowing what it was about. It's about a woman, Michelle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) who is raped and has to deal with the consequences of it.
This is a great movie, where Verhoeven lives up to his reputation as a subversive director who forces the viewer to confront his own hypocrisies and moral failings. There's a lot of critique of "rape culture" in this movie, of a lot of tropes we've seen in the media just in the past few years, this is a very well thought out film.
The most obvious one is that Michelle is not the "ideal victim". Her life has been difficult and she has been let down by three generations of people. Among those older, both her parents let her down, she has a difficult relationship with both, and her father is a famous murderer, with the police having immortalized her as the crazy daughter due to one decontextualized photo. Her own genration has let her down, she had to break up with her ex boyfriend because he hit her. Her son has let her down, she feels he is not amounting to anything much at all, she doesn't like his girlfriend either.
She copes, I think, by trying to be the psychopath the media portray her as, but it doesn't work. She actually does care about people. She buys pepper spray for self defense ... but she also learns how to treat its injuries. She cheats with her friend's husband, but she hates it more and more as time goes on. Her attempted coping may make her look like "a *****" to some, but it's a shield and a mask. It does come to at a cost later on, when she feels she cannot go to police.
Video games also play a role. She works for a video game manufacturer, an industry which has been the sight of controversy in the past few years due to portrayals of violence against women. This is very explicit in the movie, in a gratuitous way that you can't miss it. The movie doesn't moralize on the point at all, it just makes it clear and unambiguous how video game design is an accelerant to rape culture.
I didn't know what this movie would be about, and I didn't feel like seeing another rape-related movie after watching Room, Confirmation, and Braveheart on the plane a few weeks ago. However this was very well done, it was about the Michelle's journey, how she deals with what happens to her in the context of her own life and personhood.
Grade: A
Paul Verhoeven's Elle
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