[yasr_overall_rating]
A successful businesswoman gets caught up in a game of cat and mouse as she tracks down the unknown man who raped her.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think it is. “Elle” is the one of the most confusing, uncomfortable, and just all around awful films I’ve sat down and watched in a theater. It was the worst. The plot made no sense. The characters are beyond unrealistic. There isn’t even anyone named Elle, though the French definition of Elle is “she,” but that makes this title even worse. Why not just name it “She” for the U.S. release? This felt like an artistic attempt at a title but I think it mislabels the movie. The film does try to do a different take on how a rape victim responds to their attack, but ultimately. it makes no sense. I always expect amazing stories, writing, and dialogue when I watch a foreign film. In my experiences so far, most foreign movies get to operate at a level of artistic freedom that I’ve often felt was missing in most modern American cinema. This film did not deliver that. Instead, it makes me wonder how it made it all the way to post without anyone pointing out some key issues within its story. I wanted to walk out of this movie so many times but I have a rule, I must finish any film that I start, so I stayed. The movie’s synopsis that I read before viewing it, was simple and left me with a hopeful idea for this film as it suggested to me that it would be more of a revenge thriller similar to “Kill Bill” or “The Brave One,” but alas, it was not.
The movie opens with Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert), our protagonist, as she is being raped by an unknown assailant. After he leaves, she goes about the rest of her day as if it didn’t even happen. The only moment as a viewer that I felt she even truly accepted what happened to her, was in a bath scene, where blood from her attack makes a red patch in the bubbles and she frantically tries to make the patch disappear from view. From there the film gets no better, no more interesting. It gets dark and in many ways to me, idiotic. The movie forces a lot of attempted awkward comedy, if you can call it that, on the viewer as we try to handle what we are being told on screen. This story centers around rape to the point that it has 5 rape-like scenes within 2 hours. All including the same person, and the same victim, Michèle. She is a strong, independent, single woman with a troubled past, I get it but does that excuse the fact she spends most of the film coming off as inhuman? No. Her presence was more akin to a robot, and it felt that way in every scene of the movie.
To be honest, none of the key characters of this film feel human. They all lack basic elements, like human reactions to dramatic or traumatic situations. Her best friend is too naive, Michèle feels like a walking slap in the face to everything that makes sense, and her son is a loser. I wanted to slap him in the face at every turn and just say “Stop!”
The realism herein is constantly lost due to how these characters interact with one another. You laugh at them because you know just how ridiculous everything they are doing and saying is. It’s all just too unrealistic to be taken seriously. All the characters just feel like moving jokes, to be laughed at for their absurd responses to things as they happen. “Elle” is no cat and mouse game, it is watching a mentally unstable woman, make bizarre choices for 2 hours, while everyone around her does the exact same thing. I thought based off the reviews and the rating on Rotten Tomatoes, that this film would be a 5-star film. I was wrong. This film only deserves 1 star. I think that it could have been something much more amazing, but somewhere during its development, something went wrong. It could be how it was subtitled, or maybe how it was edited, or it could even be the best of what they could do, based on what they were able to film. I would love to see if the original script is anything like the finished product.
In theaters Wednesday, November 23rd
