FILM IN REVIEW

1 8 2 Y F I L M I N R E V I E W C H A R L E S T A Y L O R When the Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven started work on his latest film, Elle, he assumed it would be an American production. He hired an American screenwriter, David Birke, to adapt the French novel Oh . . . , by Philippe Djian – and that was as far as the Americanization got. Not only couldn’t Verhoeven obtain American financing but, according to him, every A-list American actress who read the script turned it down cold. The project moved to France, where Isabelle Huppert, who had originally wanted to make a film of Djian’s novel, took on the starring role. Watching Elle (which opened for wide release in November 2016 after making its American debut at the New York Film Festival in October) I find it hard to know whether to be stumped about why Verhoeven thought he could get the movie made in this country, or touched that he did. Given the current state of public discourse in America, where even the most banal things stand to be politicized – and in the case of cultural conversation, often with no more aesthetic than political intelligence – Elle feels akin to a blasphemy. What Verhoeven and his co-conspirator Huppert have done is to take the most explosive issue of the day, sexual assault, and upend the orthodoxies that have grown around it. Elle isn’t a 1 8 3 R conscious refutation of those orthodoxies. That would mean acknowledging they existed. Elle occasionally has the same calculation you find in the imperious and casual impudence of a line by the poet Frederick Seidel, something easier to admire than to like. Mostly, though, the film feels as if is speaking from that place where ideology becomes irrelevant to experience. A colleague who saw the film at the New York Film Festival press screening told me that when a critic in the audience asked Verhoeven if Elle was a feminist or an anti-feminist movie, he said it was neither. That’s the mark of both an artist who has chosen art’s exploration of the uncertainties of experience over the sureties of ideology and a culture in which movies and books are judged by whether they display the correct social and political attitudes, and – especially young – critics look at art as if it were an editorial to which they have to pledge either agreement or dissent. The subject of the film is rape, specifically the unpredictable response of one woman (Huppert’s Michele) to being raped. The literalness, the distrust of nuance that permeates our conversations right now probably obliges me to say the film never pretends that consensual sex is not possible or that, even when Michele’s assault plays into her own fantasy life, the reality of rape isn’t violent and ugly. But Verhoeven and Huppert also understand that even consensual sex can never be made safe. It’s too mysterious, too complex, and sometimes so frightening that people hide their motivations and desires even from themselves. For decades now, feminist scholars and writers have rightly insisted that rape is an act of violence, an act of control, and an act of power. What we are loath to acknowledge is that power is not alien to but an intrinsic part of sex itself, that sex is a constant nonverbal negotiation in which we sometimes act and are sometimes acted upon and thus it can never be rendered wholly benign. As precisely made as it is, the meanings of Elle remain slippery. Aware of how easily we settle for comforting answers about so barbed a subject, the movie abjures psychology, and so Michele’s motives can seem opaque, as can the movie’s overall meaning. Just when you think you’ve figured out what it’s doing, Elle swerves down another course. The opening sequence is a perfect example. Under a black screen, we hear the sounds of a struggle: a cry of surprise, things being broken, fists hitting flesh. You steel yourself 1 8 4 T A Y L O R Y to...