After receiving some recommendations from some friends and reading some positive reviews I decided to see Elle, a film produced in France and directed by Paul Verhoeven.
The film shows the fragment of Michèle Leblanc's life after a man breaks into her house and rapes her, reflecting her way of dealing with that event and her relationship with the rest of the people.
In the film, a thriller, we see a rather harsh, morbid story, but narrated with a very strong sexual component, just like the video games designed by the company that Michèle heads, and something that French cinema has accustomed us to.
It begins with a very strong scene, showing a female character on the ground, and above her a masked man who has just sexually abused her in front of the impassive gaze of her cat. The rapist leaves, but first he must clean his crotch which is stained with the blood of his victim, and then Michèle simply decides to go on with her life.
In the course of the story we see Michèle being harassed by the man who raped her, who sends her messages and visits her home when she is not there, however, there is more to this movie, the story is not limited to this but rather delves into the tortuous past of the main character, played by a very good Isabelle Huppert, marked by the terrible events that her father did.
In addition, the film also focuses on the relationship she has with her ex-husband, a writer who begins a relationship with a young yoga instructor, something that makes Michèle somewhat jealous; her son Vincent, who will soon become a father; her mother, who has a relationship with a much younger man; her friends and colleagues at work; and her employees and neighbors.
David Birke was commissioned to create a script based on Oh…, a novel by Philippe Djian, he does an interesting job, however, because I have not read the novel, I cannot say if what the script reflects is very different from what Djian proposes in the book.
The positive points of the film are the performance of Isabelle Huppert and the risky proposal of Paul Verhoeven.
However, the film fails mainly in one thing, in the same thing that almost all the films that opt for the miniplot or antiplot format, exposed by Robert Mckee in his book, fail: to present the film to the public as something different from what it is for that way to make the audience attend to see it.
Is it a thriller? Yes, but saying that Elle deals exclusively with the story of a raped woman who is harassed by the rapist is a huge oversimplification and omission. For that reason I said that the film tells a fragment of the life of the main character and how it relates to her environment, yes, where the rapist is, but this is only part of it.
In reality the film explores the nature of her character and the relationships she has with the rest due to her personality. For this reason the film wanders a lot and does not focus on a single event in the story, since it shows us the vision that the character has of the world leaving questions without explicitly answering, but that the viewer with open eyes will be able to intuit or infer.
The film was nominated for many awards, it even received an Oscar nomination, something admirable considering that it only had a budget of 9 million and only grossed just under 11 million.
With Elle we are before the classic film that is praised by specialists and is misunderstood by the majority of the public. The minimalist narration away from the conventional narrative that Hollywood has us accustomed to makes this the way it is. For this reason it will be common to hear many describe this film as pretentious. It is? I don't know, in my opinion Elle is not a bad film, but it is not a gem either. Would I see him more than once? I do not think so. Was it worth seeing? I would say yes. Would I recommend this movie to other people? Selectively.
This movie starts with a very simple premise, but it is very interesting how it becomes complex (even if in a slow way).
Hey! Thank you very much for expressing your thoughts about the movie. And yes, I think you are right.
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