As Elle’s director Paul Verhoeven put it, “we realised that no American actress would ever take on such an immoral movie.” However, Isabelle Huppert didn’t hesitate, and has delivered a performance of such force and boldness that even the disarming Oscar-winner Emma Stone might secretly admit that perhaps the wrong woman won on the night.
But it has to be admitted that Elle (adapted by screenwriter David Birke from Philippe Djian’s novel “Oh...”) could never be mistaken for a Hollywood production. A perplexing but electrifying mixture of sexual violence, black humour and social satire, it might be considered misogynist or voyeuristic or merely in dubious taste, were it not for Huppert’s commanding presence, allied with a batch of supporting performers who mesh smoothly together like a finely-tuned theatrical company.
From the opening, Elle defies you to pin it down to a single genre. Neither Verhoeven – a brazen button-pusher who made Basic Instinct and Showgirls, let's not forget – nor his star are in a mood to take prisoners. We hear, but don’t see, Huppert’s character Michèle Leblanc being attacked and raped by an intruder in her home in the Paris suburbs (Michèle gets a gun, pictured left). Then we see her tidying up the wreckage of her living-room, despite the blood running down her thigh, and getting on with her life as though nothing has happened – no cops and no trauma counselling. Though she does buy some CS spray and learns to fire a pistol.
She refuses to play the victim. It seems her private persona is as controlled and inscrutable as the professional face she presents to her employees at the tacky but lucrative computer games company she runs with her close friend Anna (Anne Consigny). Though the team of 20-something designers and programmers who create lurid sex-and-monsters romps regard Anna and Michèle as a pair of old squares, Michèle is happy to spell out with extreme bluntness where their work is falling short and who’s running the company. She demands more on-screen death, sex and titillation.
While Michèle’s mystery attacker – we see him in increasingly startling flashbacks, dressed in a black outfit with a balaclava helmet – keeps up a campaign of creepy and obscene harassment, Verhoeven assembles a picture of the rest of her life, through which she moves with an aura of cool, ironic authority. She knows what she wants, takes it and leaves it. She has a casually friendly relationship with estranged husband Richard (Charles Berling), but like most of the men she knows he’s ineffectual and slightly ludicrous (“their flailing vulnerability is endearing,” as Huppert herself commented). She’s having an affair with Robert (Christian Berkel), but her emotional investment in it is zero. She impatiently does her best to put up with her son Vincent (Jonas Bloquet), a gormless under-achiever shackled to a hysterical tantrum-throwing girlfriend (Alice Isaaz). When the latter has her baby, Vincent ludicrously can’t bring himself to accept that the child is black, unlike its supposed parents.
The only man who truly piques Michèle’s sexual interest is Patrick (Laurent Lafitte, pictured right with Huppert), a handsome, successful banker, who has moved into the house opposite hers with his wife Rebecca (Virginie Efira). In several raucous dinner and party scenes, Verhoeven makes plenty of space for his excellent cast to cut loose with abandon, and when Michèle throws a Christmas party she seizes the opportunity to flirt outrageously with Patrick. Meanwhile, much macabre comedy is extracted from Michèle’s toxic relationship with her mother Irène (Judith Magre), a grotesque plastic surgery junkie with a weakness for gold-digging gigolos.
Storm clouds gather, however, when Michèle finds herself drawn into a potentially fatal cat-and-mouse game with her attacker. As events gather pace towards an explosive climax, her motivations become darker and knottier. Is she planning an elaborate revenge, or does she genuinely relish being beaten and violated? Perhaps the fact that her father was a notorious serial-killer from the 1970s has left her with catastrophic psychological damage… or perhaps there’s more of her father in her than she can bear to acknowledge. Verhoeven isn’t going to spell it out, and Michèle will only live in the present and refuses to dwell on the past. We have to form our own judgments. Isn’t that the way it should be?
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Elle
For budgetary reasons these larger events happen off camera or in newsreels, but the house itself is not cut off from the wider context. The liveried servants, the staff in the kitchen, the guards all have an urgent need to know what’s happening in the negotiations. Some yearn for an independent Muslim state, others are passionate for India to remain whole. Thus there’s a good deal of listening at keyholes and through cracks in doors.Chadha’s script, written with Paul Mayeda Berges, dramatises a nation’s agony in a story of thwarted love between two members of staff. Jeet Kumar, who is Hindu, falls for Aalia (Manish Dayal and Huma Qureshi, pictured above), the daughter of a former Muslim political prisoner (Om Puri). The problem is that Aalia is betrothed to one of her own, a soldier who hasn’t returned from the war. In the palace compound where they live tensions rise between communities, until the Muslim housing is torched.
The film is very handsome to look at, and Chadha’s funny bones lay on plenty of light entertainment. But the laughs – and the sumptuous production values - feel like a sleight of hand distracting from the greater tragedy of India’s unseen agonies, which are mainly reported in dialogue between the higher-ups. Britain also gets a bit of a free pass as the architect of Partition. It falls to Michael Gambon as General Hastings Lionel Ismay, 1st Baron Ismay, KG, GCB, CH, DSO, PC, DL - "Pug" to his chums - to embody the nastier side of British realpolitik, while the Mountbatten family unit – and by implication the British establishment as a whole – is portrayed in the most flattering light.
But the dynamic between the two moves towards conflict. When she teaches sex education – including information about homosexuality, another highly sensitive issue in Russia these days – he strips naked and rampages around the classroom, meeting her explanations about contraception with fire-and-brimstone injunctions to “be fruitful and replenish the earth”. Lessons about Darwinism are countered by his dressing in a guerrilla costume and preaching creationism.
Scenes like that reveal that The Student has plenty of very dark comedy, although you’d need an audience on the right wavelength to extract it (and some may well be lost in translation). The antics of the school’s headmistress and some of her proteges are conveyed with a pronounced degree of satire. Serebrennikov’s first significant feature, Playing the Victim, from a decade ago, another adaptation from the stage, also had a central figure who didn’t fit into the world around him, and was also gloriously rich in black comedy – but the mood in his new work is somehow darker, more desperate.
That means he hardly knows his younger sister Suzanne (Léa Seydoux) at all, and is meeting sister-in-law Catherine (Marion Cotillard) for the first time, though she and her husband Antoine (Vincent Cassel) have named one of their children after him. These two female characters are the ones that come closest to him: Cotillard’s character is especially sensitive, as she instinctively understands the issue – even if her words “Combien de temps?” lose much of their acuity in translation – that does finally remain unspoken.
Nathalie Baye plays Martine, the matriarch. Though it’s the entire family that is on the edge of a nervous breakdown, we certainly sense where it came from. Dolan has a record of harping on mothers – his debut film was titled I Killed My Mother, his most recent one just Mommy – but actually that isn’t the dominating relationship here, rather it’s the whole entity that is under cruel scrutiny. (Nathalie Baye with Gaspard Ulliel, pictured above right.)
The script also chooses to zoom in on the domestic lives of the Tsarnaev brothers, the perpetrators of the atrocity. The older brother Tamerlan has a wife and a small child, and is clearly of a more ideological bent. “[Martin Luther] King was a fornicator,” he sneers. “But I’m a fornicator,” reasons his doubting kid brother Dzhokhar, who has a penchant for videogames and fast cars. But the main focus, the glue holding the centre together, is fictional police sergeant Tommy Saunders (
Director Peter Berg licks the story along at an efficient pace, imparts a powerful sense of a city under siege in the overhead camerawork, and wrings tears in a final reveal involving the actual participants. Dramatically, though, for all the immense effort of the manhunt, not quite enough is at stake in Patriots Day. There is some alpha dog dick-waving between the FBI and John Goodman's police commissioner (“this is my fucking city,” he hollers). And that's about it.