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Poland/France/Germany 2011
Directed by
Malgorzata Schumowska
99 minutes
Rated R

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
3.5 stars

Elles

Synopsis: As Anne, a married journalist (Juliette Binoche) for the upmarket women’s glossie, Elle, prepares an article on female university students who pay for their studies by prostitution, she contemplates her own sexual choices.  

The poster for this film rather oversells its erotic value. For the most part it’s a commendably honest depiction of a middle-aged woman reflecting on her socio-sexual identity as a wife and mother.  It is clearly a film made by a woman (it is Polish screenwriter, producer and director Malgorzata Schumowska's fourth feature film) but it is not in the confrontational style of Catherine Breillat’s feminist films. Rather it is a driven by a gentler, more humanistic perspective that with philosophical acceptance rather than exhortation or anger depicts the less-than-perfect compromises offered to women in the patriarchal order of things.

Although a diversely European production, typical of its French location it is a talky film, the device of a journalist interviewing two women giving Schumowska and her co-writer, Danish French-based psychoanalyst, journalist and screenwriter Tine Byrckel who received a credit on Lars Von Trier’s 2009 film Anti-Christ, plenty of opportunity to explore their subject matter without resorting to contrived dialogue. The result is elegantly measured film.

Perhaps too much so as with her two young women Schumowska tends to indulge the whore-with-a-heart-of–gold cliché whilst overall the film has very much the look and feel of typical French art-house fare – stories of well-to-do Parisian bourgeoisie portrayed with quality production values and lashing of classical music. Indeed Elles would have been improved by vigorous pruning. One scene with a drunk Anne and one of her interviewees eating spaghetti should have been left on the cutting room floor and frankly the relatively explicit sexual encounters go on too long.

On the other hand, Schumowska encompasses the diversity of her material with finesse. The non-linear structure leaves us unsure as to whether the sexual encounters that we see are those of the girls or what Anne imagines them to be, whilst a variety of men are portrayed without being reduced to feminist whipping boys, the result being to create an effective portrait of the irresolvable problems of civilization and its discontents, or more simply put, male-female relations.

Juliette Binoche has long been a go-to girl when you want a sexually provocative, elegant Parisienne, a role which she has played without special distinction in any number of European films.  Her performance here however is particularly fine. She is at once a sharp-eyed journalist, a neglected wife in a conventional marriage, a loving mother who is losing touch with her sons and a middle-aged woman with sexual desires.

Elles is not a film that is going to draw big audiences but as a candid adult drama it is well-worth considering.

 

 

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