The Amsterdam-born director Paul Verhoeven rode a wave of sexually graphic, gay-friendly European films like Spetters and The Fourth Man into a Hollywood box-office bonanza: Basic Instinct, Robo Cop, Showgirls. He retains his sensationalist touch with his new erotically charged thriller Elle, opening Friday.
Paris-born actress Isabelle Huppert plays Michele Leblanc, a middle-aged designer of computer games who lives in the shadow of a sexually charged childhood trauma. This is a serious film whose creator is so good at creating dramatic red herrings that you may miss the perversity of its theme and content unless you brush up on your basic feminist texts. Deep into the film a character causally tosses off the observation that "a woman who's read The Second Sex will chew you up and spit you out." Like the best of Hitchcock's American-produced thrillers, Elle is chock-full of role reversals and heroes who are considerably less than fully heroic.
Michele is a woman with a checkered past who abhors men but isn't physically drawn to women. Michele is running a cutting-edge videogame business whose target audience is a kind of young man she'd have little truck with, but whom she understands and manipulates as a consumer of a violence-fueled medium. A hint as to whether this film is for you is that the novel it's based on is by the same author whose early work was adapted into the extremely violent 1986 French art-house hit Betty Blue, some of whose characters come to an even worse end than the inhabitants of Elle's human zoo.
Our heroine is capable of grasping this digital age's bag of dirty tricks, including ordering a cute young male assistant to hack into the computers of everyone on the staff of her little company. Another perverse touch is having the film's inciting incident triggered when Michele lets the cat out and her rapist in. The rape is depicted as a hyperviolent, truly scary event. Coming home from seeing Elle, many viewers might consider replacing their glass patio doors with something of bank-vault-worthy construction.
A tad long at 130 minutes, Elle is full of surprises, including some rough rape scenes. Not surprisingly, it's rated R: moviegoers 17 and under need an adult guardian for scenes of sex and sexual violence. Ultimately, Ell e is the kind of movie that makes French cinema still vibrantly relevant, especially in the scary new age of Trump.