His dark materials | 16 March 2017

The enticingly subversive films of Paul Verhoeven were very tempting to me as a schoolboy. When I hit 14, the Dutch director released RoboCop and the excitement among me and my friends at catching two hours of unmitigated ultra-violence reached fever pitch. He did not disappoint.

That was in 1988 and it was interesting later on to read several newspaper articles accusing Verhoeven of having made a fascistic screed in favour of zero-tolerance law enforcement. This was not something any of us had considered up to that point, but satire, yes, even back then we had an inkling of what that was and RoboCop seemed to fit the bill nicely. Verhoeven’s latest movie Elle (reviewed by Deborah Ross last week) shows the old powers haven’t waned.

If anything his subversiveness has grown more acute, and harder to read. Faithfully adapted from a novel by Frenchman Philippe Djian, Elle stars Isabelle Huppert as Michèle, a successful businesswoman who is raped by a masked intruder after he forces his way into her home. Her immediate reaction is curious to say the least. Instead of calling the police, she calmly brushes up some broken china, takes a bubble bath and orders sushi to share with her adult son, who is coming round to dinner.

As Verhoeven tells it, his original plan had been to make Elle as an American movie. The original screenplay adaptation of Djian’s novel Oh… was even written in English. But this avenue was ruled out when all of the American actresses Verhoeven approached to play Michèle turned him down flat. ‘The reason wasn’t so much because of the rape scenario,’ says the 78-year-old director, ‘but more because in the third act of the movie we go in a surprising direction after Michèle finds out the identity of her rapist.’