Malgorzata Szumowska (2011)
Juliette Binoche is the visual equivalent of the actor whose vocal brilliance means they can read from the telephone directory and be spellbinding. Binoche can be an annoying presence too (see Certified Copy) but as Anne, the journalist protagonist of this new film, she is – as she was in Hidden – fascinating to watch just doing normal things at her Paris home. She doesn’t appear to be acting yet there’s a definition to her movement and to every gesture that seems to enrich her characterisation. She wears no make-up here and it’s as if we can see her even more clearly than usual. Malgorzata Szumowksa is fortunate to have Binoche in Elles because this is otherwise, in spite of its superficially bold themes and plenty of aggressive sex to illustrate them, an unsatisfying and a rather silly film.
If I understand the narrative (I may not), the action takes place over the course of twenty-four hours. Elles begins as Anne’s husband Patrick (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) and her two sons, the teenager Florent (the inappropriately named François Civil) and the younger Stéphane (Pablo Beugnet), go off to work and college/school respectively. (It turns out that Florent is actually skiving off.) Patrick’s boss is coming to dinner that evening and the meal and its aftermath provide the climax to the film, which ends with the family reassembling for breakfast next morning. When the males go out, Anne, who writes for the French Elle, stays at home to complete the article she’s been writing. It’s about student prostitution in Paris and it’s soon clear that Anne has become obsessed with her subject. We see her interviews with the two young women who feature in the piece – Charlotte (Anaïs Demoustier), who’s French and who uses the name Lola when she’s selling her body, and the Pole Alicja (Joanna Kulig). We also see their sexual encounters with various clients. You assume at first that these are flashbacks to events which Charlotte and Alicja are recounting to Anne in interview. As the film progresses and Anne’s fascination with the girls’ modus vivendi is revealed, these episodes are interspersed with what appear to be her fantasies. By the end, you wonder if virtually all the bedroom activity was in Anne’s imagination – or, at least, reflects how she visualised what Charlotte and Alicja told her. During the dinner party, she shuts off from the tedious conversation of her guests: she sees round the table, instead of them, a selection of the men who we’ve seen previously as clients of the two young prostitutes. But there’s an exception: one of the men involved with the girls really is one of the dinner guests (Scali Delpeyrat). Are all the clients we see in the sexual episodes men whom Anne knows in real life? Does their behaviour in those episodes indicate how she, in some part of her mind, actually sees them?
Anne is shocked not only by the lives that Charlotte and Alicja lead but by their cheerfully pragmatic attitude towards it. Charlotte explains that she feels more in control with her clients than when she’s with her boyfriend; what she finds disgusting is the drab existence of her parents (Valérie Dréville and Jean-Louis Coulloc’h). Like Charlotte, the hard-up Alicja finds that the money comes in handy: it allows her a much better standard of living than she could otherwise enjoy. At one point in Elles we’re introduced to a blowsy middle-aged woman, wearing clothes that are brightly coloured and tight-fitting. I immediately assumed she was a prostitute of a more familiar kind (on screen anyway) than the two youngsters Anne is interviewing. The woman turns out to be Alicja’s mother (Krystyna Janda), who discovers a sex toy in her daughter’s possession and upbraids her in tones of conventional maternal consternation. Malgorzata Szumowska may be using Anne more persistently than this character to make us aware that our own conception of prostitution, like hers, is behind the times. Yet we don’t get a sense that the subject of her article is a radically new departure for Anne – it’s surprising that she’s so easily shockable. We often watch her preparing the dinner which, for her husband, is professionally significant: Szumowska wants to stress how much this woman, even though she has her own high-powered career, is still on kitchen duty. The plot of Elles depends on the job that Anne does but the director is so preoccupied with her domestic servitude that she has her react to Charlotte’s and Alicja’s sideline as if she were not a hard-bitten journalist but a middle-class housewife – who needs to get out more but can’t because the males in her family prevent her from doing so.
The Polish mother and daughter share a bed. As the girl sleeps, the mother leans over and holds her daughter in an embrace which may be more than maternal. This moment connects with the larger ambiguity of Anne’s feelings about the young women. We see Anne flirting with Alicja especially – is this a flashback or a fantasy? We watch her masturbating: is she turned on by the variety of sexual experience that the two young women enjoy – highly exotic to Anne, whose boring chavinist husband turns down her offer of fellatio after the dinner guests have gone – or is she physically attracted to the girls? I’m really not clear what Malgorzata Szumowska is getting at in Elles. I partly suspect that she sees the way that men treat women as essentially subjugating so that all women who have relationships with men are, to that extent, a sisterhood: the signs of intimacy between women in the film may be meant to express this as much as lesbian attraction. (I also suspect that Szumowska and Tine Byrckel, with whom she wrote the screenplay, include the character of Alicja’s mother partly because Anne can’t have a daughter: she has to be on the receiving end of an exclusively male ménage.) The girls’ clients are sadistic (Andrzej Chyra) or pathetic (José Fumanal) or desperate (Laurent Jumeaucourt) or callow (Swann Arlaud) or more than one of these things: you can’t help but feel they’re all treating Charlotte and Alicja badly. But Charlotte and Alicja – both intelligent and pretty – don’t feel abused or degraded; and Szumowska is also insistent that Anne can’t understand the girls’ sense of empowerment.
Malgorzata Szumowska appears to want to have it both ways. She means to show that men use women. The only two possible exceptions in evidence are, in spite of what Charlotte says, the boys that she and Alicja choose to be with for free (Ali Marhyar and Arthur Moncla). Yet Szumowksa also suggests that the two girls are liberated. This thesis is irritating not least because Charlotte and Alicja are educated whores: as such, they’re likely more acceptable to the audience that Szumowska means to challenge. She makes such confusing points about prostitution that what in the end seems outrageous in Elles is less the matter of sexual exploitation than the high cost of living for students in Paris today. Since the film is worth seeing mainly for Juliette Binoche doing chores and making them look remarkable, it’s fitting that one of the domestic details is, after Binoche, the best thing in Elles – a fridge door that won’t close properly. When Anne is preparing the dinner, some of the images are given an obvious sexual flavouring. Better is the moment right at the end when, at the breakfast table, Anne passes her husband a jar of preserves she can’t get the lid off: Patrick shows his masculine strength to succeed where she fails (and looks pleased with himself). This closing sequence is scored by the closing movement of Beethoven’s Seventh. One of my favourite bits of music, it’s also one of the most overused in contemporary arthouse cinema. It just about works here if you’re prepared to believe it’s playing on the radio: Anne listens to what I assume is the French equivalent of Classic FM, which never seems to play the unexpected.
21 April 2012
