Film Critics Laugh as ‘Rape Comedy’ Premieres at Cannes

May 25th, 2016 5:07 PM

Editor's Note: Disturbing content below.

The media routinely insist on taking rape seriously (think: The Hunting Ground). But an odd hypocrisy arises when entertainment media suddenly praise a “rape comedy.”

Directed by 77-year-old Dutch-born Paul Verhoeven, Elle stars French actress Isabelle Huppert, 63, as Michèle, a video game company executive who is raped in her home by an unknown attacker. Advertised as a “rape comedy,” the film was deemed “empowering” and a “dangerous delight” by film critics who admitted they laughed throughout.

The French-language film premiered for the first time at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on Saturday and will arrive in the United States this fall (courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics).

By opening the film with the rape scene, Verhoeven invited “aghast reactions from the start,” according to Vulture critic Jada Yuan, with “the screams, the crash of breaking glass, Michèle's cat looking on as a man in a ski mask wipes her blood away from between his thighs.”

For the Hollywood Reporter, film critic Leslie Felperin recounted Michèle's reaction in more detail:

“Michele does not fall apart, or go into obvious shock, or go to the police or even shut down sexually after her attack. First she brushes up the broken crockery on the floor and tidies her house. Then she takes a bath (the bubbly froth goes red with blood above her vagina, suggesting how violent the rape was). She continues to be as tough as old boots at work … She continues to have trysts with her married lover and also has the hots for her strapping younger neighbor across the street. In one delicious, perversely Hitchcockian-cum-Brian-DePalma-esqe scene, she masturbates while watching him, through binoculars, set up a Nativity scene with his hyper-Catholic wife. Michele, in short, refuses to see herself as a victim at all.”

Likewise, in the trailer, Michèle calls the rape a “bike accident” and refuses to report it.

Because of the character's reaction, Indiewire critic Eric Kohn suggested the movie showed the rape a positive light, never mind a neutral one.

“The final act is the intellectual's answer to ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’” he wrote of the film, “an ambitious statement about the ability to heal psychological wounds with violent sex.” 

While the film seems to scream the opposite of “comedy,” that’s exactly what Verhoeven called his project. The media ran with the label beginning with the Playlist’s Jessica Kiang’s review of the “comedy about rape.”

Better yet, according to Verhoeven, the film was flooded with American influence (even though American actresses allegedly refused to star in it).

"This movie is about me going to American culture, living in the United States, and coming back out to Europe with an American heritage," he said.

And anyone who took offense, shouldn’t.

“The story shouldn’t be taken as a realistic story,” actress Huppert said at a press conference. “It should be taken as more of a fantasy. The fantasy is within yourself but it’s not necessarily something that you want to happen.” 

Film critics and the entertainment media proved hesitant to publicly praise the film – although they privately loved it.

“You could practically smell the fear in every blog, review and social media post, especially those written by men, as they tentatively, gingerly, oh-so-carefully heaped entirely deserved praise on Elle,” wrote Felperin who hailed the film as “the smartest, most honest and empowering film about rape I’ve ever seen.”

The Daily Beast called it the “rape-revenge film seducing Cannes, Indiewire described it as a “lighthearted rape-revenge story” and even The Guardian welcomed the “brazen rape revenge comedy” as a “dangerous delight.”

In a piece published by the Huffington Post, Associate Professor of Cinema and Theater in Paris Karin Badt called the film “tense, disquieting and hilarious every instant.”

“Throughout we laugh out loud,” she added in the middle of her review.

For “many critics,” she concluded, the film premiered as “a strong contender for the Cannes Palme d’Or,” the top prize awarded at Cannes.

In agreement, although with more restraint, Vulture's Yuan admitted, “I had several conversations after the movie about whether it was wrong to have laughed so much in a rape movie.”

While Yuan anticipated an uproar from Americans with “how Michèle deals with her rapist,” she also insisted that she would “not apologize for being blown away.”

As if that wasn’t enough, the praise continued with Los Angeles Times film critic Justin Chang as he described it as “breathtakingly elegant and continually surprising” and Variety critic Guy Lodge deemed it “perhaps the greatest of Verhoeven’s storied career.”