Elle

With his masterful Elle Paul Verhoeven joins the elite — Bunuel, Hitchcock — in seeing how pervasive is the perverse. He extends the explicitness from Hitchcock’s Frenzy as he examines the power of the sex drive in a humanity devoid of innocence. 

Consider the two religious characters. Michele’s father obsessively blessed the neighbourhood children on their way to school. Ordered to stop his blessing, he went mad and slaughtered a host of people — and pets. Neighbour Patrick’s wife Rebecca is pure Christian, saying grace, watching the Pope’s Christmas mass on TV, journeying to witness his visit. But it turns out she’s known all along that her husband has been violently raping Michele — and thanks her for giving him what she couldn’t. In a Bunuelian twist, Michele is first aroused by Patrick when she watches him carrying in the giant manger statues.

Nature seems on the side of the sinful. Michele’s cat witnesses the first rape with neither a squeal or a scratch to defend her owner. The storm rages enough to give Patrick the opportunity to come “help” Michele and try some normal sex with her. But he needs the weather’s rage in himself if he is to perform. 

Paradoxically, the raped woman who was associated with her mass murderer father is attracted to the handsome banker who seems stable and virtuous (at least, Catholic). But that tall dark and handsome hero is the violent rapist who can’t do normal sex. Everything — and everyone — is twisted.

Michele’s response to the first rape is surprisingly cool. She tidies up, soaks herself, then matter of factly proceeds with her life. She doesn’t call the cops because she doesn’t want to renew the police and press situation she suffered as a child. She prepares to defend herself against another attack and seeks among her acquaintances and colleagues any hint who he might be.  When she tells her friends about the rape she retains that shell.

And that’s the point. Her childhood experience of her father’s sin has left her unemotional, detached, even from her own violation. The press called her “The Ash Girl” and now she’s the ash woman — dry remnants, all the fires spent. Whether masturbating at the manger scene or hand-jobbing her best friend’s husband over a waste-paper basket, her sex is functional, free of passion or commitment. She is, after all, Michele LeBlanc. An uncontaminated White, whatever she does or suffers. 

Her analytic remove contrasts to son Vincent’s blind ardor for his bitchy fiancee and the obvious act “his” son is actually black. Michele supports him and tries to advise him but she lacks a motherly closeness. She even wonders if he might be the son of her best friend Anna, whom she let breast-feed him when her child died at birth. 

Michele’s self-awareness and self-acceptance contrasts both to her grotesque mother’s pursuit and use of young men and her ex-husband Richard’s infatuation with a young Yoga teacher — who doesn’t know his novels! 

Sex is an irrational drive towards all these characters’ abasement. As is, of course, the sex Patrick requires of Michele and would likely continue to “enjoy” if Vincent had not stumbled into the scene and killed him. Vincent is as deluded about his mother’s sex life as he is of his own.

Michele has found a more sensible way to join the world of the young than her husband and mother have. Michele runs a hugely successful fantasy game empire that exploits the age’s fascination with and fear of monstrous sexuality. The game scenes point to a society coarsened and savage in its diversions. It also reminds us how all art serves as a sublimation of our most compelling energies and drives. Patrick’s brokerage (like his good glacially blonde Catholic wife) doesn’t give him the fulfilment Michele’s crew of gamers does her.

The happy ending has the ironic sting of Bunuel’s Viridiana. From the sequence of rape, blasphemy and betrayal a new relationship emerges. Having established the inadequacy of sex with her friend Anna’s Robert, her own ex Richard and the violent rapist, now-dead Patrick, and not wishing to sink to her mother’s hunger, Michele walks off with Anna. 

The first time they tried lesbian sex they dissolved into laughter. They have a cozy sleep together here. Whether they go on to a sexual relationship or to a post-sexual intimacy doesn’t matter. That's another movie. They have survived a series of sexual and violent relationships and betrayals. They emerge beaten but unbowed. They’ve survived the destructive powers of sex — and have managed to make a fortune commercializing it for the frustrated adolescents aged 12-76.  They are woman. They are strong.