ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

Cortechba Overrated

PlatinumRead Just so...so bad

Scotty Burke It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

proud_luddite Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) is a well-off Parisian CEO of a video-game company. Her past includes a childhood trauma and her life is troubled in various ways among family, friends, and people at work. Things get worse when she is brutally raped and has a very unusual response to the situation.In the film's favour, it is very well directed by Paul Verhoeven who creates a dark and mysterious mood. He is well aided by the haunting musical score by Anne Dudley. Huppert is also marvelous in the lead role. This is to be expected as her presence and performances always raise her films to a higher level.The trouble is in the role itself as well as the script. Yet again, Huppert plays a twisted sadomasochist like she did in "The Piano Teacher". While she can be praised for taking on dark roles, it would be nice for the sake of contrast to see her in a cheesy rom-com in which her greatest dilemma would be deciding what to buy as a Christmas gift for a loved one.Despite potential sympathy for all that has happened to her, Michèle, like almost everyone else in the movie, is unlikeable. David Birke's screenplay has too many oddities and leaves too many loose ends by the conclusion. It also has a very contorted view of the traumatic experience of rape - something that leaves a poor taste by the end.

glyptoteque It´s an insidious disease this; when people reach a certain notoriety or fame, in the eyes of quite a few people they can´t seem to artistically do anything wrong whatsoever. If you have made a name for yourself, whether that be in music, film, art etc., you have reached a godly status and are henceforth impeccable and unassailable as a creator. Nothing can touch you, and if by any chance you happen to see through the shoddy seams of the emperor´s robes, you are accused of not having depth enough to "get" the immortal creator´s vision. It looks like shit,it sounds like shit, it smells like shit and it sure taste like shit, but hey, what do you know?! It´s not really shit, it´s your own limited, narrowminded self that stops you from seeing what a transcendental masterpiece it really is. That is the kind of laughable nonsense being spouted from the mouths of the fawning idiots. Blindness sure comes in multiple forms, sigh... Verhoeven has made one decent film, Basic Instinct, and while not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, it at least had a certain tension and coldness to it that I remember I found tittilating. This piece of trash however? One of the worst films I´ve ever watched, it actually beggars belief.The main character is a middle aged woman who runs a gaming company, and one day out of nowhere a ski-masked man attacks her in her home and proceeds to rape her. Normally after such a harrowing experience one would think that the victim would experience severe mental trauma and would struggle to cope in her everyday life, because that is the hard reality, right? Of course it is, but hey what do you know? It turns out that this rape don´t faze our main character that much, in fact she doesn´t report it to the police, she really don´t want revenge, and she casually mention the incident to her friends. And hey, her friends, it turns out, aren´t that bothered by the episode either, just one of those pesky things that happens, you know. Our main character goes about her life, running her company, interacting with her retarded son ( who for the life of him can´t see that the baby his fiancee has just given birth to can´t be his, because you know, he himself and his fiancee is white as snow and the baby is at least four shades darker than him. Of course the baby is his, of course it is. And Verhoeven gets away with writing this shit?!!! ), her man-eating mother, her academic failure of an ex etc. In between the daily goings on of work and family feuds, a few more rapes is thrown in for good measure, none of them with any tension what so ever. After a while it´s revealed that her rapist is her good neighbour, the one she has a crush on. You would think that this revelation would destroy her world, but considering that the first rape didn´t really leave dent in her, this don´t make much of a negative impression on her artificial soul either. On the contrary, it turns out she quite enjoys being raped, and in between the rapes, she´s having dinner with him and the two of them seems to have quite the lovey-dovey relationship. One usually have such relationships with one´s rapist, doesn´t one? Nothing out of the ordinary I would think. If you want to sink your teeth into a film that is neither her nor there ( what does it want to be? a dark comedy? a psychological thriller? a family drama? a deep commentary on the dehumanizing of rape? an erotic romp in the delights of s&m? who knows and frankly who cares ), a film where every character is behaving and reacting like automatons and as such impossible to empathise with in any way ( none of them is expressing any real emotion, no response to the different situations occuring is in any sense close to reality ), a film despite it´s premise managing to display zero tension and thrill, by all means, go right ahead. Just be aware that the golden robe the emperor is wearing is an illusion, what is adorned around his body is on the contrary filthy, stinking, worthless rags. He is not a god at all, he is a beggar. His crown is mud.

Edgar Soberon Torchia I am not a follower or scholar of Dutch director Paul Verhoeven's worked. I liked a few of his films a lot, others left me indifferent. However, I recognize that there is a gulf between the incendiary films he made in the Netherlands, and what he does now, after establishing in Los Angeles and becoming an "international filmmaker". Between the man who made "Turkish Delights" (1973) and "The Fourth Man" (1983), to the one that directed "Basic Instinct" (1992) and "Showgirls" (1995). There is a transition from his early simple and honest movies to the standardized products made with high budgets, that lack the disturbing world vision in the first works. And after going up and down, between poor works and other more successful (as the amusingly proto-fascist "Starship Troopers" in 2000), Verhoeven returned to Europe taking with him the expertise of industrial cinema, mixed with some viruses that affect the cinema of Los Angeles. In 2016 "Elle" was released, his adaptation of the novel "Oh ..." by Philip Djian, which provoked debates and controversies about the vision of the female world and the "empowerment" of women. Long in excess (2 hours, 11 minutes) and with a pastiche and monotonous musical score by Anne Dudley, "Elle" tells the story of an unhappy, perverse and sick businesswoman who is experiences a curious regression towards her past and old family "values" , after reaching the lowest point of her downfall when she is violated repeatedly by a masked man. I do not deny that similar stories can occur in reality or that everyone perceives the cinema in their own way, but I really do pass. Verhoeven applied the skin-deep "know-how" he learned in commercial films to a story that demanded a bit more rigor, perception and sharpness. He opted for effects and sensationalism: maybe it was always the same in his film prehistory in Holland, and I never noticed it, I do not know... The cynical and feminazi audience of these times ended up applauding a character without ethics, without love, only with an insatiable and almost dry vagina. The "well-behaved" world discovered Isabelle Huppert! The actress does absolutely nothing here that she has not done the same or better in countless times... I do not know how many films to mention, because I've always liked what she does: "The Lacemaker", "Violette Nozière", "A Story of Women" , "The Ceremony", "The Pianist" ... In short, to each his own. Surely, there are those who liked it and want French cinema to lose its own signature and resemble one more melodrama from Hollywood. Bon appétit.

ershkia It is often unhelpful to try to squeeze a film into a single main idea and that is even more true if the film is a good one. But I am going to break my own rule here to talk about the latest film by Paul Verhoeven. Not that I think Elle lacks nuance, but without seeing the thread that binds this film together, the intentionally provocative tone of the film can detract from its merits and push the film into lazy pigeonholes: misogynistic, exploitative, incoherent and if you are looking for a longer list of pejorative adjectives, Richard Brody's review in the New Yorker is an excellent thesaurus.Elle starts with a rape scene and what follows is how the main character, Michèle, deals with this presumably traumatic experience. I say presumably because her reaction to this incident throughout the film defies all expectations of how anyone might react to an assault. After the intruder leaves her house, she gets up, with some difficulty of course, sweeps the broken plates off the floor, takes a bath and orders takeout for dinner. And when she finally realizes that the rapist after all was her neighbour, someone whom she happened to have a crush on, the viewer is confronted with another what-the-heck moment when she, this time willingly, gets herself beaten down again. Let's start with the easiest hypothesis to refute. This film is plainly not about the damage rape can do to the victims, the film doesn't even try to make the protagonist likable enough to get the viewer's sympathy. A revenge thriller with a strong female cast? Surely there is an element of revenge in the film but it is hard to reduce it to a revenge story when the protagonist is drawn to her rapist. A misogynist story, disguising itself behind a criticism of conventional morality to show rape as a common fantasy and not all that terrible in reality? If she, a woman with a strong and dominant personality throughout the film, subconsciously yearns submission, why does she have to ruin her dream came true by taking her revenge at the end? And here is why I think a single main force behind Michèle's actions can save us from this confusion, and that force is not morality, or a sense of justice or shame or anger, or the society's pressure, but the agency to do what she desires to do in spite of all that. What the film is doing here is highlighting agency by taking the notion to its unnerving and sometimes darkly comical extreme. After the assault happens, she is physically hurt but mentally settled enough to order a takeout. She doesn't call the cops not because she is embarrassed or afraid of telling people what happened, she tells her ex-husband and friends about the story in the restaurant scene after all, but why bother with the cops if she can take matters in her own hand? Her reaction is no different every time someone reminds her of her mass murderer father out of spite, she keeps calm and carries on. But why does she willingly fall prey to the neighbour's sadistic behaviour? Is she a masochist? Well, the last thing she probably cares about is we pondering what she is or she is not.This is not to say that Elle should be seen as a manual on how to handle sexual assault, or as a realistic character study of Michèle and her motives. What the film does though, so effectively and so outlandishly, is bring to life not perhaps the most lovable but a memorably strong character that leads her life with the ultimate agency.