Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Elles Blu-ray Movie Review

Lust and Submission in the City of Love

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater September 11, 2012

There's nothing new about the world's oldest profession, and perhaps that's part of the reason why most critics have characterized the sex-work- centric Elles as banal. The film does deal with some well-worn themes—flesh as a commodity, prostitution as a means for upward mobility, and the simultaneous empowerment and subjugation of women who sell their bodies for a living—but I'll be contrarian and say that if lacking in originality, Polish writer/director Małgorzata Szumowska handles the familiar material with an intoxicating mix of intelligence and uncomfortable eroticism. A graduate of the National Film School in Łódź, Szumowska—like her fellow alumni Roman Polanski and Krzysztof Kieślowski—often indulges a fondness for visual symbolism as a means of expressing unspoken emotional and philosophical complexity. While she might not have the subtlety of the two Polish cinema legends—there are indeed a few too-obvious allusions in Elles—Szumowska's style is bracing, using minimalist compositions and jarring cuts, often back-scored by baroque classical music cues. Just don't let the NC-17 rating and lurid subject matter fool into thinking you're in for some arthouse titillation. Yes, the film straddles the line between sensual and explicit, but for every steamy scene, there's at least two more of depressive middle-class malaise.

The always wonderful Juliet Binoche gives an uncompromisingly raw performance as Anne, a middle-aged journalist for Elle magazine trapped in a loveless marriage of convenience to her businessman husband, Patrick (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing). Anne's day-to-day existence is a tenuous balancing act between her professional, freelance obligations and the routines of stay-at-home domesticity. Her youngest son is addicted to noisy shoot-em-up video games. Her eldest skips school, smokes pot, and treats her with zero respect. Patrick expects her to keep both kids in line and have a multi-course meal prepared for a dinner party with his boss and a few coworkers later that evening.

You could say Anne is the opposite of henpecked—sure, cockpecked will work here, I guess—and though she dutifully performs her motherly/wifely role, it's clear she has some misgivings about the particular path in life she's taken. She'd much rather be typing away at her iMac than slaving away in the kitchen, but her husband is quick to denigrate her and doesn't seem to appreciate her intelligence or opinions. "Promise me, just for tonight, you won't say any of your feminist stuff," he requests, to which she sharply replies, "It's not my fault if they make sexist remarks." This is a film where the genders are inexorably at-odds and far more different than alike.

The sex disparity is the focus of Anne's latest piece, an in-depth, 12,000-word exposé on female Parisian college students who prostitute themselves to get ahead. For sources, she's tracked down two self-employed call girls willing to discuss the, shall we say, ins-and-outs of their trade. Charlotte (Anaïs Demoustier), who goes by the nom de boudoir "Lola," is a freckle-faced brunette who worked fast food and babysitting jobs before turning to turning tricks, hoping to make enough cash to escape her lower-class upbringing. (Which she characterizes by "the smell of housing projects, acrylic sweaters, cheap furniture.") Likewise, the angular blonde Alicja (Joanna Kulig)—a Pole studying neoliberal economics in France—has pulled herself up by her garter-straps, so to speak, and now lives in a plush apartment she couldn't otherwise afford.

While the two prostitutes figure prominently in the film, the focus is on Anne and how she's affected—that is, sexually aroused—by their stories. The narrative jumps frequently between three distinct "modes." First are the interview sequences, where Anne meets separately with Charlotte (in a park) and Alicja (in a hotel room), eventually and unexpectedly developing a kind of warm, let-down-your-hair camaraderie with them that stands in contrast to her chilly family relations. From here, the film jumps to flashbacks of the two women servicing their clientele, which mostly consists of "bored husbands." The johns span the gamut of fetishes and emotional states—some sweet and kinky, some cruelly sadistic, one wracked by guilt, crying with his face pressed into Lola's naked hip bone—and the film's voyeuristic, fly-on-the-wall approach to these sexual encounters is alternately seductive and disturbing.

More potent, though, are the scenes of Anne at home, clumsily doing her chores while mentally fantasizing about these illicit liaisons. Immediately after a horrific sequence where Charlotte is raped with a wine bottle—a sequence that reminds us that, despite the women's confidence and empowerment and lack of guilt, men are still in control when it comes to prostitution—we cut to Anne lying on a towel on the bathroom floor, violently bringing herself off. How can this fantasy jive with her feminist rhetoric? Is she eroticizing her own house frau submissiveness? Is she just another spin on Catherine Deneuve's character in Belle de Jour, a frigid bourgeois wife who wants to be dominated?

Whatever the implications and motivations are, Elles—the female form of "they" in French—doesn't spell them out, preferring to let us draw our own conclusions. The reductive suggestion that all women are whores and all men essentially johns certainly plays in here, but the film is more complicated than that, recognizing that sex itself is complicated, a once-simple evolutionary imperative that's now tangled up in the web of human consciousness. In its non-procreative form, it's ideally a mutual expression of love, but the film portrays its darker side as a commodity to be bought and sold. A power to wield. A source of frustration and a vessel for misplaced desire. This might be nothing new, but Małgorzata Szumowska's provocative treatment of the topic makes Elles worthwhile, and something more than just a showpiece—which is also is—for Juliet Binoche's significant acting abilities.

Elles Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Elles was shot digitally and features a strong but not quite perfect Blu-ray presentation, with a 1080p/AVC encode that's decently sharp but occasionally suffers from slight compression artifacts. First the good: Szumowska's visual approach—with cinematographer Michal Englert—is simple and evocative, featuring careful compositions, lovely shallow depth-of-field, and a color palette that's appropriately muted and neutral inside Anne's home but warmer and more vivid outside. The image has a great sense of density and dimensionality; black levels are deep, highlights are softened, and color is rich but never overblown. Although there's some softness in darker scenes, the in-focus areas of the frame usually have a fine degree of clarity, with visible skin textures, individually discernible hairs, and plenty of detail in the characters' clothing. (What little clothing there sometimes is.) And now the not-so-good: Besides the sometimes patchy source noise that peppers darker interior scenes, you will spot some pixilation/artifacting in some shots, and one—with Binoche in the shower, see the screenshot above—even seems to suffer from harsh macroblocking. I'm not sure what the ultimate cause of this might be, but it's fleeting and not really noticeable from a normal viewing distance. Still, worth noting. At least there's no DNR or edge enhancement. Aside from these compression hiccups, Elles looks wonderful.

Elles Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Kino Lorber has given us two audio options here, the default lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround mix, and an uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 track. The latter is perfectly acceptable, but if you've got a multi-channel setup, you should definitely stick with the former, which is surprisingly immersive considering the nature of the film. I mean, this is no action movie—so you won't hear cross-channel effects galore—but the sound design smartly uses all six speakers to generate an engaging and sometimes very realistic sense of place. Paris traffic noise. The insects and birds of a sunny park. Rain pouring in sheets. Wind in the trees. The chatter in a student admissions center. The oppressive noise of a violent video game. It's all full and rich, and sounds great with the volume turned up a bit. Supplementing the ambience are occasional classical cues from Vivaldi and Beethoven, and—in one memorable scene—a sultry number from Swedish electro duo The Knife. Dialogue always cuts cleanly through the mix, and for those who speak French, the default English subtitles—which appear in easy to read white lettering—can be removed.

Elles Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Theatrical Trailer (1080p, 1:52)
• Uncensored Theatrical Trailer (1080p, 1:55)
• Stills Gallery (1080p, 7 stills)
• Also Available from Kino Lorber: Trailers for The Fairy (1080p, 1:25) and Whores' Glory (1080p, 2:03).

Elles Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Elles didn't get much love from critics during its limited U.S. theatrical release, but I found it provocative, uneasy, and sensual—a rare mature treatment of adult sexuality and social class distinctions. As expected, Juliet Binoche delivers a characteristically impressive performance, this time as a bored middle-class journalist who falls under the spell of the upwardly mobile prostitutes she's interviewing for her latest piece. Kino Lorber's Blu-ray presentation is decent, with a flawed-but-strong picture and surprisingly immersive audio—for such a relatively quiet, dialogue-driven film—but the lack of special features will probably put this one in the "rent" rather than "buy" category for most. The exception will be diehard Binoche fans, who will certainly want to add Elles to their collections.