She's tough and smart and a bit screwed up, but she's played adorable of a certain age by Isabelle Hupert.
Elle
Grade: B +
Director: Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Total Recall)
Screenplay: David Birke (13 Sins), based on novel by Philippe Djian,
Cast: Isabelle Hupert (Amour), Laurente Lafitte (Boomerang)
Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hr 10 min
by John DeSando
[Whispering to her father] “I killed you by coming here.” Michele (Isabelle Hupert)
Michele, a lovely middle-aged video game chief exec, is raped in the first scene of Paul Verhoeven’s thriller and psychological drama. After that all else seems to be colored by this shocking violation by a masked and costumed home invader. Besides the obvious question as to his identity, the less than satisfactory one is whether or not she enjoyed it. Or as boys in a locker room might ask, “Did she want it?”
This ambiguity directed by a man who helmed Basic Instinct, where Sharon Stone has all the base power a woman could ever need, gives us an equally supercharged business woman who is as appetitive as any male counterpart you have ever seen. While she cuts a swath through lovers and other men, refrains from her youth appear, especially with her father, who is doing serious time for a serious crime spree that may have involved his daughter. Hence the dark quote above as she leans over his body.
The psycho-sexual underpinning of Elle makes it one of the year’s most complex films and one of the best female performances by Hupert. As we wait to see her manipulate her next man, or females as well, just about everyone in her life, we are reminded that desire in any form, except maybe for gelato, may be rogue and inexplicable.
Perhaps the easiest motivation is with her son, who is ineffectual despite his promising background; it could be that she punishes him for being his grandfather’s grandson and therefore subject to grandpa’s demonic acts. Regardless, director Verhoeven and his writers have crafted a psychological thriller more modern than, say, one of Hitchcock.
What I do know without a professional understanding of obsession and desire is that it will always be difficult “to know the secrets of the human heart.”
“A woman who's read: ‘The Second Sex’ will chew you up... And spit you out.” Michele
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
