GamesRadar+ Verdict
A complex 🔴film that sidesteps every cliché. Paul Verhoeven and Isabelle Hu🅠ppert are at the top of their game.
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Paul Verhoeven’s double-Golden Globe winner – his first feature in 10 years – starts with a rape. Just the sounds of an assault over a dark screen: cries, blows, the smashing of glass and crockery. The first image we see is the face of a handsome dark-grey cat, watching impaಞssively. Then we see Michèle (Isabelle Huppert), prone and half-exposed on the f꧂loor of her sitting room, and a man all in black wearing a ski-mask.
Once her attacker is gone, however, she doesn’t weep or call the police. She sweeps up the debris, takes a bath – and calmly phones for a takeaway. Michè𒈔le, in short, may have been attacked, but she’s no victim. Anything but. She makes no attempt to curry sympathy – ours or anyone else’s.
The videogame company she runs with🧔 her close friend Anna (Anne Consigny) features princesses being penetrated by multi-tentacled troll🐼s; when an employee accuses her of being too “literary” she retorts, “Maybe we’re two bitches who just got lucky.”
At a dinner party, her much-face-lifted mother announces her ꦏplan to marry her toyboy; Michèle waits for the polite congratulations to die down, then asks, “How do you manage to be so grotesque?” In between rapes – yes, there are several – she’s pursuing a loveless affair with Anna’s husband Robert. Finally coming clean to her friend, she matter-of-factly explains, “I needed to get laid.”
This is not, Verhoeven has insisted, “A rape comedy… There’s rape and there is comedy.” There isꦐ indeed, often of the blackest kind: witness the scenes between Michèle’s hopeless lunkhead of a son (Jonas Bloquet) and his awful girlfriend (Alice Isaaz).
