“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
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