Paul Verhoeven
Elle

- Why did you make this film?

- Because it was necessary.

This could be the beginning of a conversation with Paul Verhoeven about this film. Yes, because Elle is one of those works that tries to give its audience an additional cognitive element. In the sense that by leaving the theater, one carries with them various insights about their life, about how they evaluate it, how they evaluate people and their actions. There are films like this, that project themselves outside the screen, that are not only beautiful to watch but reverberate in daily thoughts and perhaps elevate, transform, and make them more complex.

The sphinx that emerges from the narrative is particularly impenetrable and contradictory. A protagonist who escapes every definition, who is both victim and perpetrator, caring and selfish, mother and daughter, a sphinx indeed, seemingly insensitive yet deeply connected to the world and the many figures surrounding her.

Michèle Leblanc is not really just a character. She is a concept, a limit concept. She represents the overcoming of any prejudice and moral judgment on human action. Michèle embodies the overcoming of the dichotomy of good and evil, love and hate, victim and perpetrator, etc. Because she absorbs everything in her kaleidoscopic figure.

But Verhoeven's vision is even more radical. A single character is not enough to dismantle the value system (if we want to say it, of Catholic imprint) that is intertwined with the Western view of the world. And so, here comes a series of ambiguous figures: the ex-husband, a flirt but present, the lustful yet deeply sensitive and sentimental mother, the inept son capable of a decisive turnaround, the son's girlfriend, a bitch but..., the polite and gallant neighbor but..., the apparently solid friends couple, the young resentful colleague but, the other devout but.

What is sketched out is an incredible (in richness and depth) human and social fresco. All aimed at dismantling the logic of prejudice, the easy correlation between appearance and essence, the Manichean distinction between good and evil.

And in the end, in such a contradictory, ambiguous, promiscuous social framework, what emerges is someone who, like the protagonist, embraces contradictions, embraces them, immerses herself in the corrosive pool of life and its inconsistencies, its (apparent?) horrors, and its (equally apparent?) joys.

These concepts, far from being taken for granted, are rendered with great cinematic effectiveness thanks to two main factors. David Birke's screenplay, which especially in the first half is almost dizzying for the amount of content conveyed, and the performance of actress Isabelle Huppert. Such a gigantic figure cannot but overshadow the other characters, yet the diegetic weave manages to give space to everyone. If anything, it is the other actors who fail to keep up with Huppert, who delivers a series of extraordinary ambiguous expressions: at times it's impossible to distinguish between smiles and malicious grins.

The style also becomes a bearer of this omnipresent duality. Thus, drama and farce continuously alternate, giving an extra pace to the work, which towards the end tends to want to resolve too many issues, but it would have been wiser and more coherent to leave everything in suspense.

And then, if we want, Elle is also a lesson in female dignity, or rather, a true overcoming of gender discrimination. Overcoming in both senses: the woman is a leader, the woman is unscrupulous, the woman is also a victim but never engages in victimize. Because in life, the film tells us, victims and perpetrators constantly blur together.

8/10