Elle (Paul Verhoeven)

[Spinal]

IMDb

[Spinal]

The poster cracks me up. Yep, that's right. Just a tender-hearted tale of a beautiful French woman and her loving cat.

I wouldn't call this one of the year's best, but I admire its audacity and willingness to go to uncomfortable places. It was also quite remarkable to see an actress in her 60s given a chance to play a character with such a deep, complicated sexual life. It's impossible to imagine this movie without Huppert. Who else could pull this off?

[transmogrifier]

Huppert is brilliant, but the film around her is a bit of a mess, really (but never an uninteresting one). It's a collection of hot-button gender issues that are assembled haphazardly, with the film relying far too much on the inherent inscrutability of the lead character to get around actually having a plot that makes much sense on a narrative level.

[Ezee E]

Eh. It's fine for what it is.

I don't think the role is a stretch for Huppert, who seems to have done this role a half dozen times by now in better movies. I felt that the twists were pretty obvious as it progressed. The ensemble seemed to all be interesting, but I just started to think about how other stories in the movie were really more interesting than the primary one.

[number8]

The poster cracks me up. Yep, that's right. Just a tender-hearted tale of a beautiful French woman and her loving cat.

I saw this in a packed theater surrounded by people who seem to only went to this because of the awards buzz around Huppert, because I heard a lot of post-movie chatter expressing confusion that they just went to some kind of psychosexual b-movie thriller. It cracked me up, wondering if they even knew who Verhoeven is. It's not like the poster said "From the director of Showgirls and Basic Instinct."

[Grouchy]

Absolutely floored by this. Best goddamn film I've seen in a long, long time.

[dreamdead]

I'm positive on this, but largely because Huppert and Verhoeven elevate the mediocre script to such a level. There are tantalizing questions left unexplored here, such as whether Huppert as a child aided her father in any capacity, whether he was covering up for any of her involvement, why Huppert would leave her husband after he struck her (but remain "attracted" to her anonymous attacker), and to what degree she believes that she warrants punishment.

The film inches toward all of these interesting ideas, but then veers away before anything more substantial can be said about them. I like it overall because it has that Assayas demonlover take on perverted sexuality (and her company seeks to profit on that interest at a global level), but it unsatisfactorily delivers on the above questions.

[Grouchy]

Disagree entirely. The script (and its deliberate ambiguity as to what's going on in Huppert's head) is the third pillar of this masterpiece alongside Verhoeven's direction and Huppert herself.

For me, the "tantalizing" questions about her father's crimes are left unanswered on purpose, and it works. We see her hatred towards her father as that of someone who has been a victim but we also sense that a lot of people still perceive her as an accomplice. Also, I don't remember the line of dialogue where it's established that her ex-husband struck her. I thought the issue had been infidelity.

I do agree that the film merely touches on a lot of hot button issues that it doesn't explore in depth but I think it makes sense if we frame it in context in Verhoeven's career. He has already made plenty of films centered around sexual themes and this is, in a very deliberate way, like the biggest, most ambitious of them all.