Elle (18)

PAUL Verhoeven can be a frustrating director, whose talent and daring is sometimes obscured by lurid material – most notoriously in Basic Instinct and Showgirls. But the Dutchman’s inclination to combine provocation with entertainment is perfectly expressed in his breathtakingly assured new film.

Adapted from the novel Oh … by Philippe Djian, Elle deals with the unequivocally serious subject of rape, in a package that plays like a thriller laced with a comedy of manners. I can think of few films that walk a moral and tonal tightrope quite like it.

Verhoeven is well-served by his adaptor, David Birke, but most crucially by his star, without whom it’s unlikely he would have pulled it off. Isabelle Huppert’s performance as a rape victim with a singular response to her attack is a subtle, multi-layered, charismatic and unexpectedly funny tour-de-force – and just another day in the office for one of the most fearless actresses in the business.

Huppert is Michèle Leblanc, the daughter of an infamous psychopath who murdered everyone in their street when she was 10 years old. She’s somehow managed to overcome the trauma and vilification by association of that event and, by all accounts, has led a well-adjusted life: she has an easy relationship with her ex-husband, a grown son, a beautiful house and is the powerful boss of a successful video game company.

But when she is raped, by a masked intruder in her home, it becomes evident that her past hasn’t really gone away; Michèle refuses to inform the police, because she knows it would launch her again into the public eye, in a way that never contained any sympathy. “You’re the victim,” urges her best friend and business partner Anna (Anne Consigny). “I was the victim then,” she replies coolly.

In fact, Michèle doesn’t act like any conventional notion of a victim. In the immediate aftermath of the assault she sweeps up the smashed kitchenware, then orders a takeaway, and moves forward with a preternatural matter-of-factness that is at once admirable and troubling. When she discovers the identity of her attacker, her response becomes yet more enigmatic, and even dangerous.

If her responses to the attack aren’t singular enough, the filmmakers also resist the temptation to make Michèle a good person. She’s cruel to her mother (a silly woman addicted to face jobs and toy boys, but undeserving of her daughter’s vitriol), teases her likeable but hapless ex (Charles Berling), is having an affair with Anna’s husband and flirts under the Christmas dinner table with her neighbour (Laurent Lafitte), while his wife sits next to him.

Moreover, her company peddles the worst kind of misogynistic video games – which, ironically, involve the rape and murder of their female characters, Michèle herself urging the exploitation.

Some of this behaviour is so bad that it’s hilarious. It also seems to be a part of the carapace with which Michèle has protected herself into adulthood. And despite it all, the delicate balance of Huppert’s performance makes the character enormously appealing, a strong, mercurial woman, a survivor, and a law unto herself.

Verhoeven never makes light of the rape itself, which is appropriately hard to watch, nor the continuing danger; yet he also presents a reasonably three-dimensional portrait of the rapist, while dressing the film with persistent irony and even an occasional romantic flourish. Aided by elegant camerawork and Anne Dudley’s swirling soundtrack, the result is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s more complex psychological thrillers. Elle is classy adult fare, surprising, amusing and discomforting, and far more thought-provoking than a conventional rape drama or revenge thriller.

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