Michelle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) is many things. She's the daughter of a father who was a vicious murderer. She has a high-profile job at a video game company. She's a mother. She doesn't take any BS. She also has just been raped. The attack happened right in her home and it's something she attempts to just shake off at first. She doesn't tell the police, she has to force herself to tell her closest friends and ex-husband, she wants to simply move past this. But this horrific event keeps creeping back into her life, whether it's through flashbacks to being raped or a video circulating at her work depicting a digital version of Michelle being raped or the fact that her rapist could be living somewhere nearby in her neighborhood.
Director Paul Verhoeven, working with a screenplay penned by David Birke, is no stranger to handling films dealing with heady and gruesome subject matter. In the most famous titles in his filmography, he grapples with such material through genre storytelling involving robots, aliens or fantasy creatures. But Verhoeven doesn't just work with those elements in his career as a filmmaker and Birke's script for Elle, an extremely down-to-Earth creation, without a heightened bone in its body, allows Verhoeven the chance to show off how much he can flourish even in more constrained settings.. In these grounded confines, Verhoeven (who, it should be noted, has worked with realistic fare in the past) manages to still excel as a filmmaker as he works with a movie that carries perhaps the grimmest tone of anything he's helmed.
Whereas past Verhoeven movies, from RoboCop to Showgirls, made use of prolonged shocking scenes of chaos, Elle is a feature that relies on sustained restraint to make the sense of conflict between the characters pronounced. In a tense dinner scene with Michelle and her family, for instance, the animosity between Michelle and her mother is expressed so viscerally that you'll be wiping your brow to wipe away nervous sweat, yet the loudest thing that transpires here is a cackle Michelle emits at her mother. We don't need any more than that to capture the dynamic between these two individuals and Elle makes great use of this subdued approach to storytelling throughout the rest of its runtime.
Granted, sometimes this more muted approach did leave me cold rather than captivated but I freely admit that being due to the pacing of this type of filmmaking sometimes being hard for me to grab onto rather than a comment on the actual filmmaking being subpar. On the whole, Elle is a finely-crafted motion picture, especially in regards to the complex relationships Birke's screenplay concocts. In particular, the dynamic between Elle and her life-long friend Anna (Anne Consigny) is especially a fascinatingly labyrinthine creation. Even as Elle sleeps with Anna's husband, much to Anna's ignorance (which adds a whole new wrinkle to their scenes together), the scenes of them being openly vulnerable best friends together still register as quietly moving sequences in all of Elle.
Their moments of wholesome friendship are the only real instance where the project backpedals its pervasively grim demeanor in favor of straightforward (or at least, straightforward for this movie) pathos. Michelle's behavior in these interactions with Anna are also a great example of the sort of phenomenal multi-layered performance Isabelle Huppert brings to the table in Elle. Michelle is juggling a lot of different types of secrecy between every character in this movie, if her interactions with other characters were a game of chess, she'd constantly be thinking five moves ahead of everyone else. Huppert is exemplary at subtly communicating how Michelle is really feeling even when she's putting on the most impenetrable external facade.
Huppert is especially good in her dynamic with the person responsible for raping her. The relationship between these two characters is one of the most unexpected and fascinating paths Elle travels down and Huppert handles each new facet of this part of the characters life with remarkable complexity that captures the mixture of visceral emotions Michelle feels towards this human being. Isabelle Huppert is certainly the most outstanding element in Elle, but she's not the only part of the production that manages to impress. This production tackles harrowing material that might scare of other filmmakers, but Paul Verhoeven has shown throughout his career he isn't afraid to approach distressing material. His strong work behind the camera on Elle makes me glad he's able to lend his filmmaking craftsmanship to such bold projects like Elle.
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