{"id":11828,"date":"2017-02-19T20:00:02","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T02:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=11828"},"modified":"2017-02-17T12:37:23","modified_gmt":"2017-02-17T18:37:23","slug":"elle-2016-paul-verhoeven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/11828","title":{"rendered":"Elle (2016, Paul Verhoeven)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Michele (Isabelle Huppert) is raped by a home invader at the start of the movie, and downplays the incident.  It appears at first that she&#8217;s trying to stay strong and not feel victimized, but her intense sex\/power issues (and reasons for not calling the police) are increasingly revealed &#8211; along with the somewhat lesser sex\/power issues of every single person in her inner circle.  An ensemble piece of perversion swirling around Huppert&#8217;s mighty center, it&#8217;s like a Chabrol thriller written by Todd Solondz (but better, obvs).<\/p>\n<p>Was looking up articles online and deciding what to say and found a really nice writeup by Aaron on Letterboxd.  So instead of bothering to repeat him, I&#8217;m gonna have fun looking up actors on the ol&#8217; imdb.  Need to watch this again anyway.  Premiered at Cannes with <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/11587\">The Handmaiden<\/a><\/em> and a bunch more I&#8217;m hoping to see soon.<\/p>\n<p>Michele&#8217;s son Vincent (Jonas Bloquet) has awful pregnant girlfriend Josie (Alice Isaaz), Michele&#8217;s ex Richard (Charles Berling of <em>Demonlover<\/em>, another sex-and-videogames thriller) has new girl Helene (Vimala Pons of <em>In the Shadow of Women<\/em>), her &#8220;botoxed cougar of a mother&#8221; (per Aaron) Irene (Judith Magre of Malle&#8217;s <em>The Lovers<\/em>) is dating weird Ralf (Rapha\u00ebl Lenglet), and the new neighbors are Patrick (Laurent Lafitte) and his very Christian wife Rebecca (Virginie Efira, star of last year&#8217;s <em>Victoria<\/em>).  Michele is sleeping with the bald husband Robert (Christian Berkel, returning from <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/197\">Black Book<\/a><\/em>) of her business partner Anna (Anne Consigny, <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/456\">The Diving Bell and the Butterfly<\/a><\/em> transcriber), also has fawning employee Kevin (Arthur Mazet, young Jean Reno in <em>22 Bullets<\/em>) and disgruntled tattooed employee Kurt (Lucas Prisor).  I think the mom dies (and Ralf turned out to be trolling her), her mass-murderer dad dies in prison, Kevin is caught creating pornographic automata videos with his boss&#8217;s face, Michele admits the affair to Anna, and she has a complicated revenge\/affair thing with the rapist neighbor, before he&#8217;s killed by her son.<\/p>\n<p>A. Nayman:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It&#8217;s not necessarily confidence that drives her so much as a flinty inscrutability that is by turns amusing, disturbing, admirable, and absurd &#8230; she&#8217;s not a pathological case, nor is she any sort of symbolic figure.  Mich\u00e8le evinces a variety of post-feminist stereotypes &#8230; without fully inhabiting any of them, and her ability to take in stride both serious trauma and workaday annoyance feels like its own form of bristling defiance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Verhoeven:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I&#8217;m much more interested in people than I was before.  I look more at people, and the way that characters treat each other, and betray each other \u2014 it was all in my movies before anyhow, but more so now.  I would love to move in that direction, and I would love to stay there &#8230; I won&#8217;t sit for ten years until something like this comes again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michele (Isabelle Huppert) is raped by a home invader at the start of the movie, and downplays the incident. It appears at first that she&#8217;s trying to stay strong and not feel victimized, but her intense sex\/power issues (and reasons for not calling the police) are increasingly revealed &#8211; along with the somewhat lesser sex\/power [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1049,1033,908,119,92],"class_list":["post-11828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2010s","tag-cat-tossing","tag-isabelle-huppert","tag-paul-verhoeven","tag-video-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11828"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11849,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11828\/revisions\/11849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}