Reporting from CANNES, France — The movie’s opening may as well arrive with an on-screen statement.
Loud shrieking lends the impression a couple is having sex. But the first sight is a close-up of a cat. Then the camera cuts to the source of the shrieks, and it turns out what sounded like love is actually an assault.
“Paul Verhoeven is baa-aack.”
Needling, absurd, campy, sexual, ambitious, kinetic — all those adjectives and a few more apply to Verhoeven. The Dutch-born director has followed one of the more improbable career arcs in modern cinema — from European obscurity to Hollywood heights to industry punch-line (“Showgirls,” anyone?), back to European acclaim. And then, finally, to silence.
Now, after a 10-year feature-film hiatus, the 77-year-old has returned with one of his most provocative and unclassifiable films yet, one that dances between two genres and subverts them both. It is vintage Verhoeven by not being vintage Verhoeven.
“Elle,” which jolted the Cannes Film Festival when it premiered here Saturday, is a hybrid European-style character drama and American-flavored thriller, a Gamergate-themed doozy about trauma, video games, fidelity, family and rape, not necessarily in that order.
Its politically incorrect portrayal of a rape victim is sure to prompt critical essays and set Activist Twitter ablaze, even while the film is likely to delight and even surpass the expectations of those in need of a good Verhoeven fix.
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French actress Marion Cotillard leaves after the screening of “Juste la Fin du Monde” (It’s Only the End of the World) during the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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British director Ken Loach reacts as he receives the Palme d’Or award for his movie “I, Daniel Blake.”
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French Moroccan director Houda Benyamina poses with the Camera d’Or award for her movie “Divines.”
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Spanish director Juanjo Gimenez, center, receives the Best Short Film award for “Timecode” from French actress Marina Fois, right, and Japanese director Naomi Kawase.
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Iranian director Ashgar Farhadi, right, and Iranian actor Shahab Hosseini pose during the award winners photo call after they won the Best Screenplay award and the Best Performance by an Actor award for the movie “Forushande” (“The Salesman”).
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Canadian director Xavier Dolan with his Grand Prix award for “Juste la Fin du Monde” (“It’s Only the End of the World”).
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Filipina actress Jaclyn Jose with her Best Actress prize during a photo call at 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Romanian director Cristian Mungiu with his trophy during a photo call after he was awarded the Best Director prize for the film “Graduation” (“Bacalaureate”).
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Mel Gibson and girlfriend Rosalind Ross
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British director Andrea Arnold poses with her trophy during a photo call after she was awarded with the Jury Prize for the film “American Honey” at 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Actress Marion Cotillard and director Xavier Dolan arrive at the screening of the film “It’s Only the End Of The World.”
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Singer Iggy Pop, left, and director Jim Jarmusch arrive at the screening of “Gimme Danger.”
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Actor Leonardo DiCaprio conducts an auction during the amfAR’s 23rd Cinema Against AIDS Gala.
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Faye Dunaway, left, and actor Kevin Spacey perform on stage during the amfAR’s 23rd Cinema Against AIDS Gala.
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French actress and singer Stephanie Sokolinski arrives for the screening of the film “It’s Only The End Of The World” at the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Actress Valentina Acca, left, producer and member of the jury Valeria Golino, director Stefano Mordini, actress Marina Fois, actor and producer Riccardo Scamarcio and producer Viola Prestieri arrive for the screening of the film “Pericle (Pericle il Nero)” at the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Eric Anzalone, front, Ray Simpson, Jim Newman, Felipe Rose, Bill Whitefield and Alex Briley of the band Village People pose as they arrive for the amfAR’s 23rd Cinema Against AIDS Gala.
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Producer Harvey Weinstein and his wife, British actress Georgina Chapman, pose as they arrive for the amfAR’s 23rd Cinema Against AIDS Gala.
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Director Olivier Assayas, actress Kristen Stewart and actress Nora von Waldstatten attend the Cannes Film Festival screening of the film “Personal Shopper” on May 17.
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Milla Jovovich attends the De Grisogono party at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17.
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Kristen Stewart poses during a photocall for the film “Personal Shopper” at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday.
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From left, Inma Cuesta, Emma Suarez, Rossy de Palma, Adriana Ugarte and Michelle Jenner pose during the “Julieta” photocall at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday.
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From left, Viggo Mortensen, Annalise Basso, Nicholas Hamilton, Charlie Shotwell, Samantha Isle, Shree Crooks and director Matt Ross pose for photographers during the “Captain Fantastic” photocall at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday.
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French model Cindy Bruna arrives for the Chopard “Wild” party at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday.
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Former boxer Roberto Duran, left, and actor Robert De Niro pose for photographers at the screening of the film “Hands of Stone” at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday.
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Jason Derulo performs at the “Harmonist” cocktail party at the Plage du Grand Hyatt during the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday.
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Usher Raymond IV, left, Ana de Armas and Edgar Ramirez during a photocall for the film “Hands of Stone” at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday.
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Edgar Ramirez, left, Robert de Niro and Usher Raymond IV at the “Hands of Stone” photocall.
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Adam Driver poses during a photocall for the film “Paterson” on Monday in Cannes.
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Actor Adam Driver, left, actress Golshifteh Farahani and director Jim Jarmusch after Monday’s screening of the film “Paterson.”
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Chris Pine, left, and Ben Foster share a laugh at a photocall for the film “Hell or High Water” on Monday.
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Salma Hayek Pinault attends Kering Women in Motion talk at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday.
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Susan Sarandon, from left, Salma Hayek, Geena Davis and Kering CEO Francois-Henri Pinault arrive for the Kering Women in Motion Honor Awards during the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Actress and jury member Kirsten Dunst arrives at the premiere of “Loving” on Monday.
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Mischa Barton on the red carpet at the “Loving” premiere.
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Actors Murielle Telio, left, actor Russell Crowe, actress Angourie Rice, actor Matt Bomer, actor Ryan Gosling, director Shane Black and producer Joel Silver pose upon arrival at the screening of the film “The Nice Guys” at the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Actors Matt Bomer, left and Ryan Gosling and director Shane Black arrive for the screening of “The Nice Guys.”
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Actor Russell Crowe takes a picture at “The Nice Guys” premiere.
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Actress Geena Davis attends “The Nice Guys” premiere during the Cannes Film Festival at the Palais des Festivals.
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Actress Marion Cotillard poses as she leaves the screening of the film “Mal de Pierres (From the Land of the Moon)” at the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Model Kendall Jenner poses for photographers upon arrival at the screening of the film “Mal De Pierres (From the Land of the Moon).”
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Actress Sonam Kapoor poses as she arrives for the screening of the film “Mal de Pierres (From the Land of the Moon).”
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Actress Kirsten Dunst arrives for the Kering Women in Motion Honor Awards during the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Actors Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf and Riley Keough leave the “American Honey” premiere during the 69th Cannes Film Festival at the Palais des Festivals.
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Actress Aishwarya Rai poses as she arrives for the screening of the film “Mal de Pierres (From the Land of the Moon).”
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Actresses Sonam Kapoor, left, and Araya A. Hargate pose as they arrive for the screening of the film “Mal de Pierres (From the Land of the Moon).”
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Actress Salma Hayek arrives for the Kering Women in Motion Honor Awards during the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Actors Gael Garcia Bernal, Salma Hayek and Diego Luna arrive for the Kering Women in Motion Honor Awards.
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Actor Shia LaBeouf poses for photographers during a photo call for the film “American Honey.”
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From left: Director Jodie Foster, actress Julia Roberts, and actor George Clooney pose together before leaving the Festival Palace after the screening of their new film”Money Monster” at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday night.
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Blake Lively on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival premiere of “Ma Loute (Slack Bay)” on May 13.
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Juliette Binoche arrives for the screening of “Ma Loute (Slack Bay)” at the Cannes Film Festival on May 13.
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Aishwarya Rai poses for the cameras at the Cannes Film Festival premiere of “Ma Loute (Slack Bay)” on May 13.
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Lily-Rose Depp poses at a Cannes Film Festival hotocall for the film “La Danseuse (The Dancer)” on May 13.
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Diego Luna, a member of the Un Certain Regard jury, waves during a Cannes Film Festival photocall on May 13.
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Juliette Binoche smiles during a Cannes Film Festival news conference for “Ma Loute (Slack Bay)” on May 13.
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Director Jodie Foster and actor Jack O’Connell discuss “Money Monster” in Cannes on Thursday.
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Julia Roberts of “Money Monster” at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday.
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“Money Monster” director Jodie Foster, center, with stars George Clooney and Julia Roberts at the Cannes Film Festival.
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George Clooney of “Money Monster” waves to photographers at the Cannes Film Festival.
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George Clooney and Julia Roberts at the Cannes photo call for “Money Monster.”
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Actress Vanessa Redgrave and director Jim Ivory of the 1992 film “Howard’s End,” which is screening in the Cannes Classics section.
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Director Woody Allen, actress Kristen Stewart and actor Jesse Eisenberg arrive for the screening of “Cafe Society”and the opening ceremony.
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Festival director Thierry Fremau, from left, producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, actors Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake and festival president Pierre Lescure at the “Cafe Society” premiere and opening night gala.
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Actors Corey Stoll, left, and Blake Lively arrive for the screening of “Cafe Society.”
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Eva Longoria on the red carpet at the premiere of “Cafe Society” at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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The scene outside the Cannes Film Festival’s opening night gala.
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Actress Kristen Stewart and actor Jesse Eisenberg arrive for the screening of “Cafe Society” and the opening ceremony of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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From left, actresses Julianne Moore, Susan Sarandon and Naomi Watts pose for photographers at the Cannes Film Festival screening of Woody Allen’s “Cafe Society” on Wednesday.
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Cannes Film Festival jury member Donald Sutherland attends the “Cafe Society” premiere and opening night festival gala at the Palais des Festivals on May 11.
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Actress Gong Li arrives at the opening ceremony of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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Actress Jessica Chastain smiles as she arrives at the opening ceremony of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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Actor and festival juror Mads Mikkelsen appears on stage during the opening ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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Actress and festival juror Kirsten Dunst waves to the crowd during the opening ceremony of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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George Miller, president of the Cannes Film Festival jury, fourth from right, poses with jury members, from left, Arnaud Desplechin, Kirsten Dunst, Laszio Nemes, Vanessa Paradis, Donald Sutherland, Katayoon Shahabi, Mads Mikkelsen and Valeria Golino at the 69th edition of the festival in France on Wednesday.
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Actress Anna Kendrick, left, and Justin Timberlake, right, arrive by boat to the photocall for “Trolls” at the 69th annual Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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Among those attending the “Trolls” photocall at the Cannes Film festival Wednesday, are, in front row, starting second from left, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Justin Timberlake, director Mike Mitchell, Anna Kendrick and director Walt Dohrn.
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Actress Kristen Stewart attends a photocall for the film “Cafe Society” at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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From left, director of photography Vittorio Storaro, director Woody Allen, and actors Jesse Eisenberg, Corey Stoll, Blake Lively and Kristen Stewart attend the “Cafe Society” photocall during the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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Actress Blake Lively poses Wednesday during a photocall for the film “Cafe Society” at the 69th Cannes Film Festival in France.
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Jury member Vanessa Paradis arrives at the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Cannes Film Festival jury member Valeria Golino arrives in southern France for the festival.
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Jury Director George Miller poses for photographers upon arrival at Cannes for the 69th international film festival.
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Jury member and actor Mads Mikkelsen at the 69th Canness Film Festival.
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Jury member Donald Sutherland arrives at the Cannes Film Fetival.
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A beach artist creates an image with sand on the beach in front of the entrance of the Festival Palace in Cannes.
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Jury members actress Kirsten Dunst, left, actress and director Valeria Golino and actress and singer Vanessa Paradis on the balcony at the Grand Hyatt Cannes Hotel Martinez.
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Iranian producer and jury member Katayoon Shahabi arrives at the Grand Hyatt Cannes Hotel Martinez.
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Hungarian director and jury member Laszlo Nemes arrives at the Grand Hyatt Cannes Hotel Martinez.
(Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP/Getty Images) “Is it the second comeback? The third? I’ve lost track,” Verhoeven said playfully.
The director’s French-language movie just had its first screening, and he looked relaxed and ready on this Saturday afternoon as he sipped water in a hotel suite.
Verhoeven has been waiting a long time for this moment, since his taut WWII thriller “Black Book,” one of the most well-received foreign-language movies of 2006, failed to produce a career resurgence. Instead, Verhoeven weathered the doldrums of second-tier Hollywood offers, the Sisyphean stops and starts of a Jesus passion project and a Marvel era that has rendered moot Verhoeven’s brand of R-rated, elegantly original pulp.
He was even willing to go in another direction.
“Somehow early on in Hollywood I was typecast as a thriller and science-fiction guy. I would have done any script someone sent me if it was interesting,” said the director, who has a chatty streak. “If Woody Allen sent me a script for a romantic comedy, I would have done that. But he never did.”
The mind wanders to how “Midnight in Paris” might have looked if directed by Verhoeven. But no matter. There is perhaps even more to mentally chew on in the film he did make. “Elle” — the product of a French-Armenian novelist, French-Tunisian producer, American screenwriter and Dutch director — is an international stew of the most captivating sort. (Sony Pictures Classics has acquired U.S. rights to “Elle” and will bring it to theaters later this year.)
>>>READ: Full Cannes Coverage
Isabelle Huppert plays Michele, a successful head of a video company who, in the film’s startling opening scene, is raped in her home by a masked assailant. (The attack recurs several times in flashbacks, with effective variations.) Rather than show understandable scarring or anxiety, Michele responds with a ho-hum equanimity, part of the character’s generally cool irony that makes her so intriguing — and part of the devilishly complex behavior that made Huppert an Oscar front-runner from the moment the screening ended. (The actress has never been nominated.)
As Michele continues to receive text-message threats, the movie dangles the possibility the culprit could be an employee at her video game company, where misogyny abounds. Michele, however, decides not to go to the police, owing at least in part to a past entanglement with law enforcement over her jailed father, whose crimes become apparent over the course of the film (and whose actions traumatized Michelle when she was a child).
Instead, the executive quietly seeks to see if she might unearth the attacker herself.
This movie is about me going to American culture, living in the United States, and coming back out to Europe with an American heritage.
— Paul Verhoeven
But even as “Elle” builds suspense over the rapist’s identity, it explores a larger interpersonal story of a complicated late-40-something executive. The movie layers in Michele’s doe-eyed slacker son and his demanding baby mama, her ex-husband, her devil-may-care mother, her close friend and business partner and the friend’s husband, with whom Michele has been sleeping. Among other characters.
Even though the movie has the beating heart of a thriller, many of its parts have little or nothing to do with the mystery, becoming a larger and more complex story of one woman’s entanglements, an unexpected hybrid.
Much, it should be said, like its director.
“This movie is about me going to American culture, living in the United States, and coming back out to Europe with an American heritage,” he said.
“Elle’s’ borrowing from film cultures on both sides of the pond without every fully being defined by either is the result of a filmmaker who has frequently done the same.
As a 30-something in the 1970s, Verhoeven was making well-regarded literary adaptations in his native Netherlands. Then he arrived in Hollywood, and in the 1980s and 1990s he was a high priest of pop culture with smashes such as “Robocop,” “Total Recall” and “Basic Instinct.”
That latter one, with its steamy sexuality that prompted some protests, was merely overture to what was to come. Verhoeven would a few years later become the vicar of camp thanks to “Showgirls”--before reinventing himself once again, in 2006, with “Black Book.”
The return to European productions has been partly by design, he said, and partly by circumstance; he couldn’t get the top-flight scripts he wanted from studios. (Verhoeven continues to live in Los Angeles.)
“Elle” was in fact initially conceived by its producer, the Tunisian-born and Paris-based Said ben Said, as an English-language American movie, which is why the script was written in English by the American screenwriter David Birke, based on Philippe Djian’s French-language novel “Oh…” Verhoeven and Birke made several key changes, including moving the story into the more visual and charged world of gaming.
Yet for all its tight thriller-y structure, the tale retained its European character. Subplots can wander in unexpected directions. Causal explanations are rarely given — how much Michele’s early-childhood trauma is responsible for her unusual approach to being raped, for instance, is left unclear.
“Paul Verhoeven doesn’t try to give explanations,” Huppert told reporters Saturday. “He raises hypotheses.” That, she said, “also makes it easy to deliver a performance,” because “you don’t have to explain things — you just react.”
Meanwhile, though some self-consciously raunchy flourishes do remain, unlike Verhoeven’s Hollywood work, of course famed for its excesses, there is — dare we say it — a sense of restraint. A scene in which Michele and her business partner appear to be taking a Sapphic turn doesn’t go there.
“I actually shot it,” he said of a full sex scene. “But then I watched it in editing and I said ‘too much,’” he laughed. That’s a rare sentiment to hear from the man who opted to film Sharon Stone uncrossing her legs.
(He also said, of “Showgirls.” I think it was badly understood at the time — it was over the top because it was a movie about Las Vegas, which is over the top. But there probably were too many naked breasts.” Yes, this is really Paul Verhoeven speaking.)
The director hasn’t been totally on hiatus. He has struggled for years to crack a Jesus story that will contain some of the ambivalence he has personally toward religion (that subtext is in this film too), and has of late been working on an epic project about the French Resistance during WWII which he hopes to get off the ground.
Three years ago, he also made a deliciously fun featurette called “Tricked,” about a blackmailed Dutch businessman, that tried some novel attempts at story creation.
But much of the time, he said, he was eyeing Hollywood movies and then rejecting them--often to his regret.
“I should have made more movies. I shouldn’t have been so critical of the projects coming to me. Why did I not take [an offered] movie that was not so good and then try to change it?,” he said. “I should have made four movies since “Hollow Man” (the 2000 sci-fi film that was a critical dud but a modest commercial success) instead of two. I don’t know where the time went,” he added.
Though Verhoeven has never had any intention of retiring, he says he does have mortality on the brain. “You get older and death looks different. It’s around the corner. When a woman dies in your film and you’re 30, you don’t identify with it. It was all about sexuality, or something else. This movie has a lot of death and it meant more personally.”
“Elle” will be the same in one respect: It will put Verhoeven back in the headlines. The press notes for the film dryly say: “No American actress would take on a part this amoral.” They may be right.
More startling than Michele’s initial laissez faire reaction is what happens when she does learn who the attacker was.
Verhoeven has a direct reply to those who find unconscionable that a rape victim would do anything other than seek maximum justice.”This is not all women. It’s one woman, and a woman who had this very specific event in her childhood. We are not trying to represent everyone.”
Still, some are likely to say the movie is trivializing sexual assaults, a reaction that could put the film in the news in an unwanted way.
“In Europe I think it will be fine,” Verhoeven said.
And in America?
The director took a pause and gave a small wry smile. “It can’t be worse than ‘Showgirls.’”
@ZeitchikLAT
