Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016)

Isabelle Huppert in Elle

Michèle Leblanc: Isabelle Huppert
Patrick: Laurent Lafitte
Anna: Anne Consigny
Richard Leblanc: Charles Berling
Rebecca: Virginie Efira
Irène Leblanc: Judith Magre
Robert: Christian Berkel
Vincent: Jonas Bloquet
Hélène: Vimala Pons
Ralf: Raphaël Lenglet
Kevin: Arthur Mazet
Kurt: Lucas Prisor

Director: Paul Verhoeven
Screenplay: David Birke, Harold Manning
Based on a novel by Philippe Dijan
Cinematography: Stéphane Fontaine
Production design: Laurent Ott
Music: Anne Dudley

Elle begins with Michèle Lebanc being raped by a man in a ski mask wearing black. He slugs her viciously during the act, and when he finishes, he takes her underwear and wipes himself off, then flings it at her before leaving. Michèle picks herself up and, as the audience silently cries out, "Save the evidence," sweeps up the broken glass and the underwear and dumps it in the trash. The next day she is back at work as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, working on a video game -- she owns the company along with Anna -- that features violent sex, and even urges her programmers to make it more violent. When she finally mentions the rape, in an almost off-hand manner, to her friends, she refuses their advice to go to the police. We learn that Michèle has never trusted law enforcement since she was 10 years old and her father was convicted of the mass murder of a number of children in their neighborhood. Elle is, in short, not a pleasant film, though it begins to take on the character of a thriller as we learn more about Michèle, her family, her ex-husband, and her friends. When we do find out the identity of the rapist, things become even more disturbingly odd. It takes an actress of the caliber of Isabelle Huppert to bring off a role like Michèle, and she remains the chief reason for watching this provocative, disturbing film. Paul Verhoeven has always been a director out to shock, and Elle is hardly an exception in an oeuvre that includes Basic Instinct (1992). But thanks in large part to Huppert, Elle becomes a probing character study, an exploration of the life of a woman whose moral compass was severely damaged by an intensely traumatic past. Huppert's performance, which earned her an Oscar nomination, helps lift the film above sensationalism into something with a solid psychological grounding, but if ever a film merited "trigger warnings," it's this one.

Starz

The Lovers (Louis Malle, 1958)

Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Marc Bory in The Lovers

Jeanne Tournier: Jeanne Moreau
Bernard Dubois-Lambert: Jean-Marc Bory
Henri Tournier: Alain Cuny
Maggy Thiebaud-Leroy: Judith Magre
Raoul Florès: José Luis de Villalonga
Coudray: Gaston Modot

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louise de Vilmorin
Based on a novel by Dominique Vivant
Cinematography: Henri Decaë

Anna Karenina without the train. That's one way of looking at Louis Malle's once-scandalous but now somewhat tepid The Lovers. That seems to be the way the German censors saw it: a story about a woman who abandons not only her husband but also her child, and seemingly gets away with it. In the German release, the scenes involving Jeanne Tournier's daughter were cut, as if the idea of a mother leaving so adorable a child was too horrible for audiences to contemplate. In the United States, of course, it was the depiction of sex -- not "cutting away to the window" as Malle once described the traditional approach to sex scenes -- that caused the censors to draw their knives. The result was the Supreme Court decision that The Lovers didn't fit Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it." He didn't, and it isn't: What we see in the scene are a briefly flashed nipple and the look on Jeanne's face as Bernard brings her to orgasm. Even the fact that she is being pleasured orally by him is only implied by his absence in the frame. The Lovers is more satiric than erotic, its targets the stale marriages and pro forma affairs of an haute bourgeoisie obsessed with hairstyles and polo games. Malle attempts to contrast the sterile dalliances of the idle rich with the more spontaneous relationship between Jeanne and Bernard, a casually dressed archaeologist who drives a clunky tin-can Citroën, but the film gets a little too formulaic, especially in the lushly romantic moonlight stroll and boat ride that serves as foreplay to the consummation of their affair. He switches back to irony at the end: Jeanne and Bernard escape together under the astonished gaze of her husband and her other lover, but we sense their uncertainty about whether it will work, anticipating the way Mike Nichols tempered romance with reality by holding the camera just a little bit too long on Benjamin and Elaine after they escape from the church in The Graduate (1967). Maybe we don't see the train but we hear it approaching.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies