Elle
The film begins in black, with the sounds of a struggle. Then we see a cat, calmly watching as its owner is raped. The woman is Huppert, her assailant is wearing a ski-mask. He leaves, and she calmly cleans up the broken vases and takes a bath, the blood from her invasion soaking the bubbles. As she's taking a bath, your mind is screaming--"you're destroying evidence," but she has no thought of reporting the crime to the police.
Turns out Huppert is the CEO of a video game company that creates very violent games, and she is the daughter of an infamous mass murderer. She thinks about revenge, and purchases items to protect her, like mace and an ax, and when the perpetrator leaves her little notes and texts suggesting he's closer to her than she thinks, she doesn't really freak out, I mean, not like I would.
What Huppert and Verhoeven do in this film is make a victim of a crime a horrible person. There are many subplots (too many) that show her as an awful human being. She is disgusted by her elderly mother's romance with a younger man. She is sleeping with her best friend's husband. She isn't helping matters with her son, who is having a baby with a monstrous young woman (when it becomes obvious that the child is not his, she is the only one who points it out). But because she is being stalked by some kind of psycho, we cut her some slack. A lot of slack.
Then the film takes a turn that I imagine might anger many feminists--it angered me. I don't want to go into it, but let's just say when she finds out who her rapist is (and I figured it out pretty easily) she doesn't react the way we want her to, or the way the film is marketed. This isn't so much a revenge film as a film about a woman who is seriously fucked up, long before she was raped.
Other than Huppert's clever performance, Elle is far too sordid and unpleasant for me to recommend.
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