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Elle

Posted on August 17, 2018 by Village Vidiot

Isabelle Huppert stars in this Paul Verhoven thriller with a sense of humor about a woman who is raped and refuses to become a victim in any sense. Michelle is a successful sex/violence video games production company owner who is assaulted by a masked assailant in her home. She is also a ‘mature’ bourgeois woman in an industry dominated by younger and more hip or geekier males She got there via publishing, but we don’t know that story. She’s also got a horrific backstory that makes her the person she is, including involvement in an astoundingly frightening mass murder. Her rapist continues to stalk her and she plays a serious game of cat and mouse with him. She’s also seeing her business partner’s husband on the side, working to mess up her ex-husband’s new relationship with a twenty-something yoga instructor, trying to deal with her mother and mere’s boytoy, and has a bizarre slacker of a son whose crazy, narcissistic wife has just given birth to a black baby he can’t see as not his. This is, I said to Bronwen, a very French film even though it’s based on an American novel. But it’s adapted so as not to become an American film, and Verhoven, who ruined his horrifyingly wonderful “Vanished” when he redid it for the American audience, knows just what that means. I liked it a lot more than Bronwen, but then adoring Huppert gave me good start in that direction.

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