Isabelle Huppert, star of Elle, with the director Paul Verhoeven at the Golden Globes GETTY IMAGES“Our whole universe,” Paul Verhoeven says matter-of-factly, “can be reduced to two things: violence and sex.” Look back at the Dutch director’s luridly controversial career and you might detect that philosophy. There’s Basic Instinct (kinky sex and ice-pick violence), Robocop (future dystopian violence), Showgirls (copious kitsch sex with a side order of violence) and Black Book (Nazi sex and massacres by the lorryload). Yet Verhoeven’s two obsessions have never been combined more compellingly that they are in his new film, Elle, in which Michèle, a Parisian woman exquisitely played by Isabelle Huppert, is raped by a masked assailant and responds in a way that is by turns nonchalant (she calmly orders sushi afterwards), kinky and downright disturbing. The New Yorker described Elle as a ‘macho fantasy’Elle is Verhoeven’s debut in French after directing…

Source: The Times March 10, 2017 00:03 UTC