In one of his interviews, David Fincher says people are perverts and that this is the foundation of his career. In the documentary The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Zizek interprets movies in a highly Freudian sense to show how directors have shown us the perverts in us by making us enjoy their work. Although I don't agree with Zizek everywhere in that documentary I feel every complex movie has to flirt with perversion in some sense or the other. There are very few movies which flirt with absolute perversion and I think Elle is one of them.
Elle is the story of how Michele LeBlanc (Isabelle Huppert), a succesful CEO of a gaming company reacts when she is raped by an intruder in her house. The movie opens with this horrifyingly violent and detached rape scene which is being observed by her cat. The sexual grunts which her heard from the rapist and from Michelle are so close but yet so far that you are already sensing a tale of perversion by the first couple of minutes. She, being a part of the civil society, doesn't even get time to grieve. This is shown beautifully when she wipes off her vaginal blood during taking a bath after the incident. She tries to go ahead with her life in a normal way. She visits her mother who is shown to be quite voyeorus which Michelle despises. In this scene her mother tells her "you always have wanted a sanitised version of life". The main question of the film is has she wanted one or she has been forced into one? The cold way she discloses the rape story to her ex-husband and her friend Anna and her husband Robert at a dinner is characteristic of the inner struggles she is experiencing.
As the movie progresses, we find that Michelle's father is a murderer who murdered half of their neighbourhood when she was 9 and then burnt their house down. People have believed that Michelle have been complicit to her father's horrendous acts that night. She has lived with this identity and yet made a succesful life for herself. Her mistrust in police is understandable. In the meantime, the rapist sends sexual messages to her. Also a morphed video of her being sodomised by a computer monster of her game is realeased in her office. All these incidents make her try to hunt down the rapist.
Meanwhile, she has been sleeping with her Anna's husband which she wants to stop as she is attracted to her next door banker neighbour Patrick. There is a beautifully crafted Hitchcockian scene where Michelle masturbates to Patrick while spying on him with a binocular as he sets up the nativity scene for his religious wife. Michelle eventually tries to seduce Patrick while she invites everybody for a Christmas eve dinner. Michelle's mother dies during the dinner and she finally visits her father in prison. But her father commits suicide after knowing that Michelle would be visiting. This event shockingly makes Michelle happy as she whispers to the the dead body that she killed him by visiting.
The movie explores many perverted and dystopian scenarios in the life of this woman and how she reacts to them. Some of her reactions are utterly perverted and disturbing but we have to remember that this is a women with extremely troubled past. If you haven't seen the movie I would urge you to stop here and comeback for the rest of this. It's an extremely well balanced movie which flirts with abolute perversion but still presents us with a tale of suppressed feelings, latent sexual desires and utterly humane characters. Isabelle Huppert has given a performance of a lifetime. She has explored all the nuances and struggles of this character in an utterly elegant fashion.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Michelle is attacked again and she in this violent encounter she founds out that Patrick is her assaulter. When asked why he did it he says it was necessary. The most sickening twist of the movie is when we find out that Michelle starts an abusive affair with Patrick. The film leaves the audience to decide whether she cannot help being in this abusive affair or it is her bigger ploy to get revenge upon Patrick. She joins the after party of her game launch with Patrick. While they return Michelle acknowledges that she feels what Patrick and she has is sick. Patrick is killed by Michelle's son when he finds Patrick assualting her. The movie gives us a desired ending but a conversation between Patrick's wife and Michelle reveals that she knew what was going on and she wanted Patrick to find whatever sexual satisfaction he was looking for.
The movie shows how we all are perverts inside but still humans. It wants to tell that you cannot judge a person harshly even if he is into heinous and devious acts. It wants to show us that with all these centuries of civilisation we may have been able to train ourselves according to expectations of the civilised society but still there is an other side hidden inside all of us and everyone of us will find those demons if we look carefully enough. Elle asks us to question what does it mean to be civilised. Are we forbidden to access our most perverted desires and if we do access how do we do it? The answer is much more complicated than this beautifully made film.
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