The opening scenes of Elle, the latest provocation from Dutch auteur Paul Verhoeven, telegraph the birth of what might become a new kind of razor-edged woman’s story. In the suburbs of Paris and in broad daylight, video game executive Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) is raped in her own home by a masked intruder with no one around to witness but her bemused, unhelpful cat.
The attack is quick and brutal. When it’s over, Michèle does the first of many unexpected things to come: She tidies up the scene of the crime, orders sushi, and goes about her day as if nothing extraordinary happened.
As she continues to live her daily life—fantasizing quietly about getting vengeance on her unknown attacker—she endures other vicious microaggressions from the people around her: Her slacker son and his insolent girlfriend, her struggling author ex-husband, the married lover she no longer wants, her sexed-up elderly mother, and the aggressive young men who work for the video game company she runs, profiting off misogynistic games that promote sexual violence against women.
Audiences may recoil at the brutality Michèle suffers onscreen. But Huppert, who brought a bleak but knowing sense of humor to a role Verhoeven says no American actress would take, waves off the emotional difficulty of filming Michèle’s rape.
The impact of such violence upon her body sinks in powerfully in a single silent image of the act’s quiet aftermath: Having thrown away her ruined dress, she eases into a hot bath and a bloom of crimson blood slowly rises into the soapy bubbles. “I watched it and remembered: I was just having a nice little time with some raspberry syrup,” Huppert laughed. “But the blood coming to the surface, and the colors… the red and the white. That’s the power of cinema, and it’s the power of a great director, you know?”