Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Elle (2016)




“Paul Verhoeven is back with a possible satire on boredom”

Paul Verhoeven’s Elle is a disturbing story of circumstance about a female video game developer named Elle, who gets raped in her own home. After the fact, Elle begins to receive phone calls from her attacker which leads to a cat and mouse countdown, as to when it will happen again. While this transpires, Elle must deal with disappointment in her son and his abusive girlfriend, disgruntled employees, an ex husband who has moved on, an abnormal mother and her father’s legacy of being a serial killer, whose sinister ideals roped her into a fatal homicidal incident as a 6 year old, turning her into a national pariah.

Elle is a subpar suspense film that reveals it’s self to be an intriguingly complex character study of modern day human clandestine conditioning. The over arching theme being an idea of boredom to reach a certain height, that anything negative yet involved to happen to you, is in some way a blessing to avoid a mundane existence. Such as; garnering a less than substantial job, unexpectedly, excepting a baby that’s not your own and allowing rape to become a sexual fetish of some kind.

The film uses Elle’s video game developing business and therefore video games, as a backdrop to the ordeals Elle and the other characters face. Used as a mocking metaphor of taking on destructive paths within violence and procrastination such as of playing a video game, the idea of real life representing the anti-climatic resolution of beating a video game, and only receiving a title screen/video sequence as a means of reward. As well as an eventual indifference to reoccurring negative tendencies; in relation to the repetitiveness of a video game.

A side plot of Elle is Elle’s relationship with her father, as he roped her into his nihilistic homicidal career when she was a child, instantly creating pathology towards Elle to become a child of nihilism. This adds to the movies theme of invited destruction, as Elle throughout the movie becomes implicit with creating problems between herself and the people in her life for sear pleasure.

This is a mysteriously blunt and clever entry by Paul Verhoeven that organically pushes the point it’s trying to make, while reserved and stylistically stagnant, to make setting contemplations about the films subject matter that can be applied to reality in a modern era.

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       -  Maurice Jones