How great is Isabelle Huppert in Elle? I was late to the table seeing this because I’d heard that it was about a woman who gets raped and likes it. That isn’t anything like what Elle is about. Instead I discovered it’s one of the most complex and multilayered roles of the year – male or female. Although there are sometimes those kinds of characters written and performed in America – like Jessica Chastain in Miss Sloane, or Rebecca Hall in Christine, or even Emily Blunt in The Girl on the Train – most of the women characters in American films are only allowed to be just one thing: good, bad, sexy, mean, boss bitch, ingenue. I can’t tell if that’s because the swarm of film critics need things to be tidy and “even” and structured, as opposed to “tonally uneven” or “flawed.” Whatever the reason, Huppert’s character in Elle, or Sandra Hüller in Toni Erdmann or Bahar Pars in A Man Called Ove provide more than enough evidence that people in other countries don’t regard women in the limited capacity and narrowly proscribed terms as we do here in America.
As far as the race for Best Actress goes, Emma Stone is more than worthy of the win. She takes what is essentially a simplistic character and fills it with so much life and verve you don’t even really think about the relative lack of depth while you’re watching her. You’re just so caught up in this magnificent screen presence. I don’t think La La Land could be quite as good without her performance. Both Stone and Gosling are great, but she really makes it what it is. So this isn’t to slight her or to say she shouldn’t win at all. It’s just to say that when you look at the whole of Elle you see how intimidated American storytellers are when it comes to writing about women.
In A Man Called Ove, a pregnant Iranian woman living in Sweden (Bahar Pars) moves in next door and becomes such a pain and intrusion into the life of a gruff older man, she ends up changing him. But the women in the film – Ove’s wife told in flashback and the pregnant neighbor – are fully realized grown women, flaws and all. Sandra Hüller as Ines in Toni Erdmann is likewise a fully fleshed out whole human being with a complicated sexual life, a career – a crazy father she can’t deal with. And of course, in The Salesman, there are so many different kinds of women represented – again, writing that considers these women as whole people.
I look at the roles in this year’s Best Actress race and I see the best written ones come from non-American writers – that’s Jackie, Florence Foster Jenkins and Elle. Emma Stone in La La Land and Ruth Negga in Loving fit well within the framework of their films as a whole, but in terms of writing they are really there to serve the plot, more or less. These actresses are able take that dimension and broaden it significantly so you barely notice.
I was shocked at how Huppert’s character in Elle is given so much dimension. She’s funny, she’s bitchy, he’s vulnerable at times, she’s angry. We get to know these facets as we see her deal with with her son, with her lovers, with her ex-husband, at work, in bed, with her mother. You tend to see these fully developed characters in European films where so much admirable value is expressed in the ways they’ve evolved.
Most people on social media have seemed to focus on rape of Huppert’s character Michèle in Elle. Does it send a problematic message about sexual assault. It does if you simply single that part out of the whole. The film requires you to do a lot more than that – and it isn’t asking your permission to sign off on whether any of this is okay. You can judge Michèle if you choose to, but Verhoeven deliberately does not. He’s telling you a story about a complicated person. She is a survivor of abuse of some kind, left a mystery at first and gradually revealed, although that’s another aspect never really explicitly spelled out. Her father went violently off the rails when she was a child, and he’s been in prison ever since. She survived that trauma on in as normal a way as possible but the poison from her childhood has been hard-coded into her DNA. Michèle eventually comes to a realization about herself but it’s messy, and ugly and hard.
Elle is strange and stirring and at times frightening. It isn’t meant to justify rape and it isn’t a BDSM fantasy. It’s more or less the exploration of flawed human beings – why they do terrible things to each other, from minor violations like computer hacking or violent sexual imagery in video games all the way up to fetishized murder.
I know that a lot of voters in the Academy are not going to be comfortable with Elle, for all kinds of reasons. For instance, we see Michèle masturbate while watching her neighbor from afar. That alone takes it off the menu of acceptable side items when it comes to picking Oscar winners. But a movie like Elle reminds us that modern Hollywood storytelling is usually as chaste and forbidding as it was in 1950s America. Sure, critics and industry voters like being titillated — but only up to a point. They like movies where young women are sexually open – but if often seems that the more in control the woman is of her sensual choices, the less acceptable she becomes. Like Chastain’s lobbyist in Miss Sloane. The film has been roundly rejected by the film community but it features a complicated, tortured woman who hires male escorts to get off. Here’s a woman who’s great at her job but she’s falling apart in other aspects of her life. Although not as fully realized as Huppert’s character, Miss Sloane is a good example of why that kind of storytelling is ordinarily off limits in the awards community. Women in awards caliber films are mostly expected to represent one thing and rarely allowed to step outside of that category.
Even Natalie Portman’s portrayal of Jackie will be ultimately seen as too challenging to awards watchers. Perhaps they want Jackie to be the Jackie they remembered from history and not the contradictory icon half falling apart and half rewriting American history before our eyes. Hard to say. It is inexplicable how industry voters cooled to one of the best films built around a female character in the Oscar race.
One can only hope that the popularity of films like Toni Erdmann and Elle and international cinema overall that more stories of sexuality might somehow spread to American storytelling. Perhaps it will require audiences and critics granting the same kind of abandon towards American films that we eagerly afford to films from other countries. As of now, regrettably, we seem a long way off from that place.