Elle (2016) on Netflix
Michèle Leblanc heads a video game company in Paris. A masked intruder attacks her in her home; afterward she cleans up and goes back to her life without telling the police.
- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb7.1/1075,014 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes91%
Trailer
Plot summary
At the video game studio she runs in Paris, Michèle Leblanc is met with resentment from some male employees and infatuation from others. Her son Vincent defers to his pregnant girlfriend Josie, and Michèle resents her mother Irène for her vanity and her younger lovers. She sleeps with Robert, the husband of Anna, her business partner, and flirts with Patrick, a married neighbor. Her father, a notorious mass murderer, faces a parole hearing after nearly twenty years in prison, and she stays wary of the police. Once the masked intruder has left her home, she tidies the room and carries on as before.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Elle (2016)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Before Isabelle Huppert was cast as Michèle in Elle, Paul Verhoeven believed Nicole Kidman could handle the role, and he also considered Charlize Theron, Julianne Moore, Sharon Stone, Marion Cotillard, Diane Lane and Carice van Houten for the part.
- Elle was originally supposed to be set in Boston or Chicago, but Paul Verhoeven found it too difficult to shoot in the United States because of the film's violent and immoral content, so he switched the production to France and spent significant time learning French to communicate with his cast and crew.
- During the rape scene in Elle, Isabelle Huppert said "Arrête!" ("Stop it!" in French), which was not written in the script; she said the scene was very violent, that she was a little scared, and that she felt the crew needed to hear something different.
- A sequence Elle planned to shoot in Paris's main police station was cancelled after the Charlie Hebdo shooting on 7 January 2015; principal photography had begun on 10 January 2015 for a ten-week shoot in and around Paris.
- Every scene in Elle was choreographed and Paul Verhoeven storyboarded the whole film himself; he shot with two Red Dragon cameras because the time a director is given has shrunk by 40 to 50 percent, and two cameras let him do things he would not otherwise.
