Directed by Malgorzata Szumowska. Starring Juliette Binoche, Anais Demoustier, Joanna Kulig, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Krystyna Janda, Andrzej Chyra, Ali Marhyar, Jean-Marie Binoche 18 cert, IFI/ Light House, Dublin, 99 min
IT’S AN AWFUL business being a middle-class woman in France. You can’t find time to get your work done. Your son won’t study. The blasted fridge door refuses to close. Why, it’s just like being savagely abused while working as a prostitute to pay your tuition fees.
That seems to be the premise of this dubious, inappropriately glossy film from Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska. If that’s not what’s being said, then the picture is merely pointless rather than dangerously misguided. Either way, Elles comes across as a very peculiar beast indeed.
Juliette Binoche is in furrowed form as a top reporter for Elle magazine. As the picture begins, the sexually repressed Parisian is researching a story on students who moonlight as prostitutes.
We watch uncomfortably as she listens to the harrowing tales told by Alicja (Joanna Kulig), a Polish girl studying economics, and Charlotte (Anaïs Demoustier), a French girl from an ordinary background. The former is urinated upon by a middle-aged client. The latter is casually abused with an empty champagne bottle.
The depictions of these acts, shot as hazy soft pornography, are intercut with scenes of poor Binoche failing to get that blasted fridge closed. Eventually, she comes to an understanding about her life as – suggesting a scene from Terry and June – she is required to host a dinner for her husband’s boss.
Addressing the drudgery of domestic life is certainly an honourable objective. Back in 1975, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles treated both that supposedly mundane subject and the issue of part-time prostitution in memorably powerful fashion. But Szumowska undermines her skewering of the bourgeois lifestyle by introducing those inappropriate parallels. She further overstates her case by layering portentous classical tunes (notably excerpts from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony) over carefully composed shots of the protagonist’s unhappy household.
Still, you couldn’t argue that the film isn’t beautifully made. Michal Englert’s camerawork is lush and extravagant. All the actors commit themselves fully. But to what end?
