Elle: A Woman's Revenge?

I watch a lot of movies, and yet sometimes I despair that my tastes are entirely too prosaic. Having grown up on a steady diet of Bollywood films and then graduating to golden age Hollywood musicals and eventually modern Hollywood, I have always made an effort to steep myself in both independent cinema and commercial blockbusters. However, European cinema continues to be a hit-or-miss experience. While Germany's Toni Erdmann was one of my favorite movies this year, watching France's Elle was a much more challenging endeavor.

The movie is the story of Michele (Isabelle Huppert), a divorced woman who, at the very beginning, is raped in her house by a masked man. She spends the rest of the film trying to figure out who her rapist was and then plays an extremely dicey game of cat-and-mouse with him once his identity is revealed. And I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's a pretty funny movie if you can ignore the rape part. Which may be my issue with the film. I don't have the stomach for rape scenes, and this movie is constantly shocking you by flashing back to the event and giving you different perspectives on it. While I understand it is necessary for characterizing the PTSD most rape victims suffer in the aftermath of the event, it is a rather relentless cinematic experience. Even outside of the rape, this is an exceedingly violent movie, as Michele is a video game developer and therefore is involved in creating gratuitously bloody games, and also has a terrifically disturbing back story where her father went on a murderous rampage when she was ten years old. All of this might explain why she chooses to address the rape in the unconventional way she does, but it doesn't make me feel any better about it.

I won't spoil the rest of the movie, but suffice to say, Michele is both forthcoming and reticent about her horrific experience, choosing to divulge the details to certain people but then being secretive about other aspects of it. If it wasn't in French, I would have completely given up on it, but there's something about the Gallic sense of existential ennui that makes this approach to violation seem understandable. You uncomfortably chuckle at the funny moments and then realize you're not quite sure why you're laughing when none of this is OK. But Huppert is delivering such a virtuoso performance that she simply sweeps you along for the ride. Before you know it, the movie is over and you are left contemplating what exactly it is that you just watched.

Ultimately, Elle is a movie I will never watch again, but it is sufficiently intriguing to watch once. It does seem to be a vastly polarizing movie (people either loath it or think it's a masterpiece) but I seem to be mostly ambivalent. I can understand why Huppert has received an Oscar nomination - she is a magnetic presence and throws herself into this role with abandon - but I am entirely too puzzled by what the point of this film is supposed to be. It's written and directed by men (David Birke and Paul Verhoeven respectively, based on the novel Oh... by Philippe Dijan) and perhaps what's lacking is a woman's touch of nuance and empathy in this particular situation. Elle is frightening, funny, exploitative, and dark;  I think I'll stick to watching La La Land.