The hall is half-empty yet. And it creates a feeling for a community center. The chairs are awkward, like a chamber concert or some other amateur activity. Actually it's not that bad, but I'm still going to watch a movie. The screen is high up - probably with the idea of being seen well by viewers sitting on a plane. But that seems to be the right place for Isabelle Huppert to appear - just below the ceiling, above all to be able to coolly and coldly watch them from above. That's it. "Elle". The woman who will hold you tense, excited at the border between disgust and desire, but far beyond the limits of perversion - one you never even suspected might exist. Cruel and cold. However, the sense of amateur activity is still approaching the rise of viewers - men and women over the '60s. Adult ladies, caught in pairs you expect to see in a confectionery in a central metropolis.
The people around me certainly feel more comfortable in the ideally-suited dining chairs, but I'm in the right place - a movie that you have to watch while something not fitting to your shapes keeps you alert, makes you to be careful. And participate. "Elle" by Paul Verhoeven is the right film about Isabelle Huppert . She is 63 years old (in the age of viewers around me) and these figures do not matter. A friend said, "If she was younger, I would not forgive her. In fact, there is no need to be younger. " You can fall into her legs and after another 20 years and expect to be punished. Or try to hurt her because her cold perverse radiance keeps you close and far away, makes you long to touch her, but you can not do that. Then you either want to kill her or run away. Maybe both together. We saw it in Michael Haneke's "The piano teacher", so we saw her the same in "Elle," though her heroine is quite different. But again in that border state, which she easily crosses. To a woman turned by men into her life into a cruel alloy of desire for pleasure and pain.
The character of Huppert who shows us Verhoeven is a woman whose father one day kills a large part of their neighbors in the neighborhood. She is ten years old and when the police and journalists come, she is in the focus of the attention. And she never gets out of it again. People, the crowd, sitting in front of TV's are convinced they have been involved in the massacre, and therefore feel right to punish her. Even years later, when the documentary about her father was again on the screens, Verhoven shows us the obvious reality that every crowd is composed of primates- people who want to give justice, and their primitive brains don't allow that their personal motivation may have nothing to do with the truth, even with just one of them. If you are in the focus of such primitive cruelty, what can be your answer? To respond with the same? To participate in men's perverse games? Are you cold to your mother and your son? To make your employees hate you? Sleeping with the man of your best friend? To seduce the much younger man of your religious neighbor? This and many other things. Is it justified? Everyone decides for themselves.
The first scene in the movie shows Michelle's rape by a masked man in the middle of her living room. Brutal and futile. Then you can mislead the false idea that the target of the woman is to find out who the masked person is. And suddenly you find yourself in a completely different film when you realize that the rapes continue even after the bully is no longer masked. Already with the permission of the sacrifice. You will be from the people like the grandmothers behind me who commented on one another: "Why does he come down with him to the basement? Fool! "Not that the movie is so complicated to understand. It's just that Paul Verhoeven is a master of deceiving your mind, of drawing your ideas and of violating your ethical stereotypes. To set you up in one way and knock you out of your comforting confidence that you know where you are and what you think will happen next. The Verhoeven -Huppert combination should warn you. If you are not prepared, you will leave the movie with the feeling that you have been forced. You can watch "It" as a comedy because the movie is that too. Still, as you laugh, somewhere in the corner of your mind, you will be overwhelmed by the embarrassment that Paul is laughing right at this moment.