TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES
Isabelle Huppert, European |
© sbs distribution
Elle
Paul Verhoeven
2016 - France / Germany / Belgium - 2h06
int. -12 ans
Screenings :
friday 26 - 4:45 pm - Grand Théâtre - followed by a debate with Isabelle Huppert - actress and Serge toubiana - critique and journalist
Michèle is one of those women that nothing seems to touch. As the head of a major video games company, she manages her business and her love life with an iron fist. Her life is turned upside down though when she is attacked in her home by a mysterious stranger. Undaunted, Michèle starts stalking him in return. A strange game begins between them. A game which could go wrong at any moment.
“As we reminded you last week when the film was screened at Cannes: Isabelle Huppert, not content with being the greatest living actress, is going through an absolutely fascinating moment in her filmography. More than a moment in her acting, it is the birth of a genre in its own right, it could be called the Huppert film, a kind of female survival movie where the actress wanders, eager and amused, through the middle of a field of ruins. Elle is the apotheosis of this genre, and at the same time underlines Huppert's pleasure in accompanying filmmakers who are themselves determined to shake up French cinema from the inside. This was the case with Serge Bozon's Tip Top, which gave a kind of instruction manual for this kind of disturbance: Huppert took a beating and seemed to enjoy it. A year later, in Abus de faiblesse (Abuse of Weakness), Breillat filmed her weakened and, in a long and very beautiful scene, literally on the floor, painfully trying to get up after a fall. Huppert signs cheques, vampirized by a playboy, and Breillat concludes with a close-up of her tearful face repeating over and over: ‘It was me but it wasn't me.'
“Verhoeven's heroine could repeat this line, just like the cat that opens the film, watching unperturbed as its mistress is raped on the floor of her flat. It is a shot with a double meaning: Huppert is less the victim being attacked than the feline standing next to her, watching the catastrophe unfold with a calm, indifferent gaze. With the assailant gone, Michèle gets up, takes a bath, puts her flat in order, orders sushi, takes an HIV test and quietly tells her friends the news of her attack: no trauma, just a series of procedures to follow, an external order to re-establish, and as a nod to psychology, an armoured door, cold as death. But this rape, which inaugurates a genuine-fake police plot, is only the beginning of a series of small intimate catastrophes to which Michèle will respond with ever greater coldness. She is there, physically present, but totally absent from herself.
“That is Huppert's genius, and perhaps the genius of all great actors – we want to ask them: ‘Where are you when you're acting?', and that is precisely the question Verhoeven's film seems to raise in every sequence. Huppert's character is indeed subjected to this question, when her lover asks her after the lovemaking ‘How did you come up with the idea of playing dead?' Remember that ten years earlier in Black Book, Carice van Houten already played dead to escape the Nazis, lying in a coffin dressed as a typhus victim. In this respect, Black Book and Elle are like secret twins, two portraits of women who are not strong but dead, who both go through a long ironic nightmare.” (Murielle Joudet; Chronicart)
“Verhoeven's heroine could repeat this line, just like the cat that opens the film, watching unperturbed as its mistress is raped on the floor of her flat. It is a shot with a double meaning: Huppert is less the victim being attacked than the feline standing next to her, watching the catastrophe unfold with a calm, indifferent gaze. With the assailant gone, Michèle gets up, takes a bath, puts her flat in order, orders sushi, takes an HIV test and quietly tells her friends the news of her attack: no trauma, just a series of procedures to follow, an external order to re-establish, and as a nod to psychology, an armoured door, cold as death. But this rape, which inaugurates a genuine-fake police plot, is only the beginning of a series of small intimate catastrophes to which Michèle will respond with ever greater coldness. She is there, physically present, but totally absent from herself.
“That is Huppert's genius, and perhaps the genius of all great actors – we want to ask them: ‘Where are you when you're acting?', and that is precisely the question Verhoeven's film seems to raise in every sequence. Huppert's character is indeed subjected to this question, when her lover asks her after the lovemaking ‘How did you come up with the idea of playing dead?' Remember that ten years earlier in Black Book, Carice van Houten already played dead to escape the Nazis, lying in a coffin dressed as a typhus victim. In this respect, Black Book and Elle are like secret twins, two portraits of women who are not strong but dead, who both go through a long ironic nightmare.” (Murielle Joudet; Chronicart)
CAST AND CREW
Cast : Isabelle Huppert, Laurent Lafitte, Anne Consigny, Charles Berling, Virginie Efira, Judith Magre, Christian Berkel, Jonas Bloquet, Alice Isaaz, Vimala Pons
Screenplay : David Birke
Cinematography : Stéphane Fontaine
Editing : Job ter Burg
Music : Anne Dudley
Production : SBS Productions, Twenty Twenty Vision Filmproduktion GmbH, France 2 Cinéma, Entre Chien et Loup
French distributor : SBS Distribution