Strong and Moving!

Let's be realistic.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

The acting in this movie is really good.

The movie gets to you until a certain moment. Then it goes beyond what seems real to me.

As in many movies, this one also tries to discredit Christianity. No artistic value to me. Waste of time and money unless you want to see a sexagenarian getting naked!

Dutch director Paul Verhoeven began his career in his native country with movies like "Soldier of Orange". In the '80s, he moved to the US and directed a series of audience-pleasing movies (RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers). In the 21st century he returned to Europe to resume a serious career. His latest output is "Elle", starring Isabelle Huppert (in an Academy Award-nominated role) as a rape victim reluctant to report the incident to the police due to suspicion of them.Huppert's Michèle is one of the most complex characters that I've seen on screen in the past few years. She runs a company that designs video games (that's the last thing that you'd expect of a middle-aged woman, especially a French one). She's haunted by the memory of the arrest of her father, who committed a horrendous crime, and now has a strained relationship with her son. It seems that her friends and cat are the only ones with whom Michèle has a truly healthy relationship. But there's a lot more to discover about each of the characters. No one is truly what they seem.This focus on sexuality, repressed memories, and relationships adds up to one of Verhoeven's best movies. The acting and subtlety of the plot show that a focus on people - as opposed to action - is what a movie needs to be good. I recommend it.

It is often unhelpful to try to squeeze a film into a single main idea and that is even more true if the film is a good one. But I am going to break my own rule here to talk about the latest film by Paul Verhoeven. Not that I think Elle lacks nuance, but without seeing the thread that binds this film together, the intentionally provocative tone of the film can detract from its merits and push the film into lazy pigeonholes: misogynistic, exploitative, incoherent and if you are looking for a longer list of pejorative adjectives, Richard Brody's review in the New Yorker is an excellent thesaurus.Elle starts with a rape scene and what follows is how the main character, Michèle, deals with this presumably traumatic experience. I say presumably because her reaction to this incident throughout the film defies all expectations of how anyone might react to an assault. After the intruder leaves her house, she gets up, with some difficulty of course, sweeps the broken plates off the floor, takes a bath and orders takeout for dinner. And when she finally realizes that the rapist after all was her neighbour, someone whom she happened to have a crush on, the viewer is confronted with another what-the-heck moment when she, this time willingly, gets herself beaten down again. Let's start with the easiest hypothesis to refute. This film is plainly not about the damage rape can do to the victims, the film doesn't even try to make the protagonist likable enough to get the viewer's sympathy. A revenge thriller with a strong female cast? Surely there is an element of revenge in the film but it is hard to reduce it to a revenge story when the protagonist is drawn to her rapist. A misogynist story, disguising itself behind a criticism of conventional morality to show rape as a common fantasy and not all that terrible in reality? If she, a woman with a strong and dominant personality throughout the film, subconsciously yearns submission, why does she have to ruin her dream came true by taking her revenge at the end? And here is why I think a single main force behind Michèle's actions can save us from this confusion, and that force is not morality, or a sense of justice or shame or anger, or the society's pressure, but the agency to do what she desires to do in spite of all that. What the film is doing here is highlighting agency by taking the notion to its unnerving and sometimes darkly comical extreme. After the assault happens, she is physically hurt but mentally settled enough to order a takeout. She doesn't call the cops not because she is embarrassed or afraid of telling people what happened, she tells her ex-husband and friends about the story in the restaurant scene after all, but why bother with the cops if she can take matters in her own hand? Her reaction is no different every time someone reminds her of her mass murderer father out of spite, she keeps calm and carries on. But why does she willingly fall prey to the neighbour's sadistic behaviour? Is she a masochist? Well, the last thing she probably cares about is we pondering what she is or she is not.This is not to say that Elle should be seen as a manual on how to handle sexual assault, or as a realistic character study of Michèle and her motives. What the film does though, so effectively and so outlandishly, is bring to life not perhaps the most lovable but a memorably strong character that leads her life with the ultimate agency.