Verhoeven’s ‘Elle’ smoulders with lust

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November 13, 2016

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Verhoeven’s ‘Elle’ smoulders with lust

By Jake Coyle | November 13, 2016, Sunday |

Print Edition

IN Paul Verhoeven’s highly flammable “Elle,” passion and cruelty burn together in the same perverted, masochistic fire.

It begins startlingly, to say the least, with the muffled screams of rape. The noises have ceased when Verhoeven’s camera first reveals a masked man, clad in black, standing up from the woman he has just assaulted on her floor. A cat quietly watches.

Other films might follow such an abrasive starting point with tears, revenge or justice. But the woman, Michele Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) catches her breath once her assailant has fled. She sweeps up the broken glass (with her heels still on), makes herself a bath and calmly orders in sushi before a visit from her son, Vincent (Jonas Bloquet).

That Michele isn’t shattered by the encounter will lose some who understandably refuse to tolerate any imagining of rape that eludes devastation. Verhoeven, rebuffed by Hollywood, took to France to tell the story, adapted by David Birke from Philippe Dijan’s novel “Oh ...”

Michele is too dispassionate for victimhood or, it turns out, many other emotions. As Verhoeven coolly, masterfully unspools the pulpy, dense layers of “Elle,” her character comes into relief. With her longtime best friend Anna (Anne Consigny) she runs a successful literary-minded video game company in Paris. She lords over a small army of young, nebbish men. Not days after the rape, she’s lecturing them that “the orgasmic convulsions” of a demon character are “way too timid.”

There is much, much more. Michele is sleeping with her best friend’s husband, despite loathing him; caressing her married neighbor’s crotch under the dinner table; watching in vain as her son devotes himself to his attractive but vile girlfriend; growing jealous of her ex-husband’s fling; and disapproving of her botoxed mother’s affair with a young man.

Few could pull off the unapologetically demented nature of “Elle” like Verhoeven. Where other directors would pump the breaks, Verhoeven — more at home in genre than art house — speeds ahead, pausing only rarely to note, dryly, the mounting absurdity. The song that plays twice in Verhoeven’s film is Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life.” In “Elle,” the more accurate phrase might be “Lust is life.”

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Verhoeven’s ‘Elle’ smoulders with lust

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