NZIFF 2016 Tranche 3
This has taken me almost two years to write, which I'd normally feel more embarrassed by (two years! Two film reviews!), but one of them comprised my thought's on Elle, which took me some time to cogitate on. I will warn that given that the film is about rape and the culture that enables it, it's probably not for everyone.
Personal Shopper
Kristen Stuart gets a lot of flak for her flat affect as an actress, and her lack of interest in looking smiley and bubbly as a celebrity. The latter is just stupid (after all, Clint Eastwood is not only a sourpuss, but most recently was notable for complaining uppity minorities will now gasp complain if you call them names. Quelle horreur!), but the former isn't an unjust complaint; but much like Keanau Reeves, used in the right role, her manner shines, and this is a great example of where it works perfectly.
As a spiritualist whose twin brother recently died, she is working as a personal shopper in Paris; in helping tidy up his affairs, she agrees to establish if his house is haunted. Stuart is perfect as grief-stricken Maureen, going through the motions of her job while exploring her late brother's disappearance.
I really enjoyed this as a horror/suspense movie; it's effective and well-directed, managing to maintain a decent state of mystery throughout. Recommend.
Julieta
Somehow I've managed to go a long time without ever actually seeing a Pedro Almodòvar film before, and I'm glad to have corrected that mistake. Julieta is a mystery that cuts between the adult life of the eponymous main character in Madrid and her youth spent in a small fishing town; the centre pf the mystery is quickly established by a chance encounter with an old friend of her daughter, who is no-where evident in Julieta's life in Madrid. What has happened to her child?
As it unfolds the past and present in parallel, Julieta is an exploration of the life of Julieta and three other women: Antìa, her daughter; Ava, an artist and sometimes mistress of Antìa's father, Xoan; and Marian, Xoan's housekeeper and Julieta's nemesis.
But it is not only an exploration of the interpersonal; it is an exploration of how personal lives in Spain have changed: Almodóvar wants to contrast the relative personal freedom felt in the wake of the restoration of democracy to Spain with an increasingly conservative present, something which becomes a key plot point.
The men in Julieta are at once important and peripheral: Julieta's present-day lover, Antìa's father, and her own father are all parts of her story, but the film is interested in them only in as much as they are part of their story, rather than as figures in and of themselves.
The unwinding of the central mystery of the movie is sad and tragic; even at the end, when a rapproachment between mother and daughter occurs, the reason is devastating.
Elle
This has often been summarised by reviewers as a "rape comedy" which is like describing "A Modest Proposal" as a "famine comedy". I mean, sure, there are moments of comedy in the film, but it's they don't really line up with a tag that suggest it finds rape amusing; quite the opposite.
On the other hand, given that The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw is one of them, that's perhaps not surprising; a man who confesses he can't understand what Diana is on about in the boat in Wonder Woman is probably going to struggle with anything relating to sex.
There are, I think, two scenes that an understanding of the film hinges on: in the first, when Michèle tells friends, over dinner, that she was raped (as a waiter is about to pop the cork on a bottle of champagne - that would be the comedy) one of them immediately asks if she has been to the police. She bluntly states there is no point - something many women might tell you, but is rarely put so plainly on the big screen. If you see the moment of bleak comedy in preference to the pointed comment on reality, I guess you could, yes characterise the film as a "rape comedy", but I think that says more about you than Elle.
In the second, we've established that Michèle owns a video game company along with her best friend; the staff resent two late middle aged women providing them with jobs, and seek to subvert their authority at any turn, often with sexualised mockery. When she goes into her office the husband of her oldest friend is there; over dinner he wasappalled and solicitious about the violent rape. In the office, though, he has a demand: she has been having an affair with him, and he wants a blowjob. When she demurs, he explains he will wait until he gets what he wants, and if that causes a fuss, so much the worse for her; a particularly pointed threat given the struggles with establishing her authority over those resentful young men. His inability to connect the violent coercion of the opening rape with his own coercion here is stark and unsubtle, but this is a Verheoven film: it isn't meant to be.
The scene plays out with a defter touch that I've described, by the way. I suppose, like the dinner scene, you could see the twisted comedy as it parodies rom-com tropes - because it's there - but if you can't see the point it's making then, again, you should be thinking more about yourself and less about the film.
Verhoeven is notable for a number of things, not least of which is poking society with a sharp stick; this doesn't always go the way I imagine he'd like: much of the satire of Robocop looks more like it's been treated as a kind of roadmap in the years since it was released, for example. In the case of Elle, this takes the form of shining a harsh light on the social context of rape; the brutal attack on Isabelle Huppert's Michèle that starts the film presents a harrowing, unflinching start to the movie, but also the type of assault most universally condemned: a masked stranger breaking into a woman's house to attack her.
There are a number of threads in the story: one is Michèle's own hunt for the rapist, which begins when it becomes clear he will continue harassing and perhaps attacking her; another is the mystery of her own family history, which begins with her hostile relationship with her mother, and the secrets of their past; finally her life and friendships in the present.
All of these intertwine to present a story which is fraught with elements which will be mis-steps for some of the audience, but also allow the cast and director to ask questions of the same audience. Michèle is not a particularly sympathetic character in many ways: she is abrasive towards her son and treats her mother with contempt; she is having an affair with the husband of her oldest and closest friend, the woman who is first to rush to her side. She heads up a game studio she and that friend founded, where she is shown demanding more and more overt displays of sexualised violence in their work-in-progress, because she knows it will sell better. In and of itself, this is a challenge to the audience: in a society where thinking about forms of sexual assault is often dominated by questions around the behaviour of its victims, the contrast between the stark brutality of it's opening scene and the unrolling of day to day life is confrontational. Do you slip into minimising the awfulness of the rape because Huppert does such a good job of creating a frankly unlikable character? Or do you minimise the awfulness of Michèle's behaviour because of her day to day behaviour? How do you feel about her games studio and the work it creates? Can you see its art as detached from the attack?
Verheoven runs the film as an exercise in confronting that spectrum of behaviours, of violence, implicit violence, and other forms of threats; the husband of her oldest friend is appalled and solicitious about the violent rape. Then he comes to Michèle's office with a demand: she has been having an affair with him, and he wants a blowjob. When she demurs, he explains he will wait until he gets what he wants, and if that causes a fuss, so much the worse for her. His inability to connect the violent coercion of the opening rape with his own coercion here is stark and unsubtle, but this is a Verheoven film: it isn't meant to be.
These examinations are the meat of the film; they are hung off the plot device of Michèle recieving threats over her phone from the rapist, which ultimately spur her into hunting him down, a device that allows the film license to ask why she might suspect one man over another (for exampke, the brilliant but awful young man who leads her game studio, who openly treats her with contempt for being both middle-aged and a woman)
Elle is a challenging film, both because it's harsh, unsparing treatment of the subject material is often difficult watching, but even more so because it asks questions about what can be characterised as rape culture. It is, I think, a tremendous shame that it has been so airily dismissed by so many critics as a "rape comedy" - but is that, perhaps, an easier way of avoiding thinking too hard about questions a review may find unflattering to his place in the world.
