Loving Your Enemy: Isabelle Huppert on Elle and Never Playing Characters
Photo: Matt Winkelmeyer / Getty
Legendary French actress Isabelle Huppert captured international acclaim in 2016 with three very diverse roles: divorced professor Nathalie in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come, reclusive chanteuse Laura in Souvenir and her explosive role in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, which recently took home two Golden Globes: Best Foreign Language Picture and Best Performance by an Actress (Drama). This week she’ll be competing for her first Academy Award.
Elle has caused a stir worldwide since the film’s release in November, with Huppert playing the lead role of Michèle, the head of a videogame company who suffers a brutal rape in the film’s opening scene and goes on to form an unlikely liaison with her next door neighbor, Patrick (Laurent Lafitte). Both critics and audiences have been captivated by the controversial ambiguity of both Michèle’s attack and response to her attack, which raises more questions than it answers. Is she unlikeable? In denial? In control? Is Michèle’s reaction exactly the response you would expect from a woman who’s constantly dealing with fires throughout their life, forced to compete in male-dominated industry? Paste sat down with Huppert to find out.
Paste Magazine: I feel like I’m in the minority, because I identified with Elle very strongly.
Isabelle Huppert: Why do you feel that is a minority? Because most people I’ve met receive the film that way.
Paste: That makes me happy! I feel like people have been unsure of how they’re supposed to respond because the subject matter is controversial.
Huppert: Yes, but strangely, and maybe I haven’t talked to everybody, so far I’ve only talked to people who think like you, and who seem to get the film, beyond the controversy.
Paste: One of the most interesting things that struck me about Elle was this notion of consent versus non-consent, because you have two characters who are mutually attracted to each other, and we get to see them both in scenes where they are fully consenting to what’s going on, and scenes where there isn’t consent to what’s going on. And that’s not something depicted on screen very often.
Huppert: That’s for sure.
Paste: Obviously there’s a lot of purposeful ambiguity to many of the scenes in the film when it comes to consent and aggression. When Michèle reaches under the dinner table in an early scene to put her hand on her attractive next-door neighbor Patrick’s thigh, for instance, after he casually touches her hand, she’s shown as very sexually aggressive.
Huppert: Instead of being offended, she goes further than he intends to go. That’s my interpretation. Don’t you think so?
Paste: I do.
Huppert: It’s true that it’s unusual, because he goes for her hand, and she says, “Oh, very quick, very fast, we haven’t even started eating yet,” and then she goes further. One could think that—in principle—normally she should just leave things where they are, and hope that he’s going to stop. But she’s always affirming something of her empowerment, in a way, and that’s exactly what she does in every field of her life. But in a very simple way. Without asking too many questions.
Paste: It seems like the central theme of her character is control. She’s looking for control.
Huppert: Exactly! She’s not even a flirtatious person, it’s not like she’s going to give him eyes or whatever, no. He goes for the hand, she goes for the leg. That’s it. It’s exactly what you said. Meanwhile, so many things are happening around the table, it makes the whole thing so funny, to be honest. There is an almost perverse pleasure because [Rebecca, Patrick’s] wife [played by Virginie Efira] just asked to say the prayer [while their flirtation is occurring].
Paste: Religion has an interesting through line in the film, particularly with Rebecca’s character, a devout Christian, and especially when she reveals that she knew all along that her husband was the one responsible for Michèle’s attack—
Huppert: It’s a very deep statement [when Rebecca reveals that she knew about her husband’s crimes]. It’s a big surprise, of course, because obviously she knew all about it and she says [to Michèle] thank you for giving him what he needed. But it’s also what Paul [Verhoeven] says, what the Catholics say: “Love your enemy.” And it’s always so ambiguous with Verhoeven, because if that’s what “love your enemy” means, then because she’s a religious person, because she’s a Catholic, she accepted something that shouldn’t be accepted. And in fact, it’s something Michèle doesn’t want to accept. In the car, she says, “I don’t want other women to bear what I’ve borne.” She has a plan from the beginning. She knows that what he does should be punished, in one way or another. And she says, “I think about other women.”