Isabelle Huppert
“ELLE” My rating: B+
130 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Isabelle Huppert has made a career of playing prickly, disturbed, often downright unpleasant figures.
For “Elle” this reliable fixture of French cinema has taken everything she’s learned in nearly four decades of screen acting and created a character who is charismatic and compelling even as she engages in behavior that most of us would find morally questionable and psychologically twisted.
She more than deserves her Golden Globe win.
Paul Verhoeven’s film begins with the sounds of a violent assault. The fiftysomething Michele (Huppert) has been attacked in her Paris home by a masked intruder who beats and rapes her.
Michele doesn’t report the incident to the cops. Instead she cleans up the mess, trashes her dress, takes a bath, and gets herself tested for STDs. New locks, a hatchet, and some pepper spray — she’s good to go.
David Birke’s screenplay (based on Philippe Djian’s novel) blends Hitchcockian suspense with one of the deepest character studies the movies have given us in ages.
Most women would be incapacitated by such an attack. Not Michele. As we learn, she is tough, smart and ruthless.
With her partner Anna (Anne Consigny) she runs a successful firm where programmers half their age crank out sex-and-violence-drenched video games. “When a player guts an orc,” she tells her staff, “we need to feel the blood on his hands.”
Michele views the world around her — and the lesser beings that inhabit it —with a sense of irony that stops just short of contempt. She can be funny, charming…and she’s certainly attractive. But apparently she needs no one except her indifferent cat. (more…)
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