Elle: Paul Verhoeven

Ha, ha! It's a good thing that I wasn't assigned to review Paul Verhoeven's Elle by any of the sites I write for. If I did, I would have had to figure out a score to give it. But since I get to write about it here, I can do the cowardly smart cowardly thing and give it a N/A rating. Why? Because I have no idea how in the hell to quantify my reaction to it. It's a rape/revenge/comedy/romance movie by Paul Verhoeven where we watch Isabelle Huppert get violently raped 4-5 times, get into a quasi-romance with her rapist, and finally kill him. It's obviously meant to be funny, obviously meant to unnerve the audience as much as the bystanders in Huppert's life. But does Verhoeven pull it off? I don't know. First off, with the exception of Robocop (1987), I've never found Verhoeven to be as smart or clever as he likes to think he is. Showgirls (1995) wasn't a satire, it was a hateful softcore porn. Starship Troopers (1997) only works as a winking parody of Hollywood war films for the first half. But again I ask: does it work here? I don't know. But I think the key to figuring it out is a sequence where one of the characters in the video game being made by Huppert's company is revealed as transformed into a powerful witch after being brutally raped. Make of that what you will.