ELLE Review

Director Paul Verhoeven will be seventy nine years old this summer, but if his latest film is any indication it seems the filmmaker has no intentions of letting age force him to be more precious. Of course, the danger in this-to prove you're just as daring or drawn to scandal as you always were-is going overboard in an attempt to defy. Going overboard in ways that can take actions or material from being seen as risky and/or bold to that of pure desperation. With nearly eight decades behind him on this planet one could certainly surmise that Verhoeven has crafted a French thriller concerning rape, betrayal, mystery, and lies upon lies for no other reason than to prove he can still be as shockingly captivating as ever, but such motivation never seems to be the case with Elle. Rather, Verhoeven is clearly only hoping to entertain as much as he provokes. It may seem odd to use the word "entertain" when describing a film that opens with an older woman (Isabelle Huppert will be sixty four this year) being sexually assaulted, but strangely enough Verhoeven opens the film with this shocking act so that the audience isn't left waiting for what has been sold as the crux of the film. Instead, we are dropped into the middle of the assault and then left to discover how there isn't necessarily a right way in which women or anyone who experiences such a trauma are expected to respond. In most instances it would seem the victim of as violent and unforgiving an act as Verhoeven documents and David Birke's screenplay describes would immediately notify the authorities and stay with a close friend or relative in light of being violated in a space they once felt safe, but none of this accounts for how Huppert's Michèle Leblanc reacts. And Verhoeven never takes the stance that his protagonists' choices are weird or wrong in any way, but more that they are interesting in the vein of bringing up more layers of this individual's story thus making the trials and tribulations of Ms. Leblanc all the more compelling and completely engrossing. It's not often with large-scale dramas or potentially cheap thrillers that the director trusts their audience enough to draw their own ideas or perceptions of the acts taking place, but just as there is no precedent for how Leblanc should react to her singular situation Verhoeven never sets a precedent for how he expects us to respond; simply laying out the facts of the story and forcing us to take them in in whatever horrific, alluring, frightening, or seductive way we ultimately do.            

TIFF 2015: LOUDER THAN BOMBS Review

If there has been a single trend in all of the films I've seen so far at TIFF it is that of the one focusing on depressed white people. Apparently, a lot of these folks become so bored with their seemingly perfect(ly fine) existences, that many others would no doubt kill for a piece of, that they feel the need to create senseless drama for themselves to feel something, anything. It's a sign of some type of narcissism as the three main male figures in this film are so self-involved in their quest to get past canonizing a woman who, despite being gone for several years, still dictates much of their daily lives. This isn't to say the death of a loved one is an easy thing to cope with, but it is the actions and the inability to communicate between these three in the wake of their loss that places them each on different roads that see them looking to heal themselves in ways of aggression or impulse or hatred instead of trying to sit down and figure it out together. Director Joachim Trier, who has made two previous features (Reprise, Oslo, August 31st) that I haven't seen has written an original screenplay with frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt and while it is easy to see where he is coming from with his examination of the effects we can each have on one another's lives, even in the smallest senses, Louder Than Bombs still feels like something more appropriate for a forty-five minute short rather than a nearly two-hour slog that keeps piling on the bad, conceit-ridden choices that push these individuals farther and farther from where they need (or want) to be.