Still from "Elles", photo: Kino Lorber
Szumowska's complex portrait of contemporary women and their sexuality is screening across eighteen states in US. A feminine project, influenced by all the women who worked together on the film, audiences comment on the numerous sex scenes shot from a female perspective
The 2011 Polish, French and German co-production tells the story of a Parisian freelance journalist dedicated to her husband, sons and ever-challenging career. Juliette Binoche plays the sophisticated and sexually charged Anne who is preparing a piece on female students prostituting themselves to pay the bills. As her connection to Charlotte (Anaïs Demoustier) and Alice (Joanna Kulig) deepens, she contemplates whether the relationships she has with the men in her life are really all that different from her subjects' connections with their clients. In an interview for Kino Lorber Szumowska explains, "We do all kinds of things for money. Juliette’s character accepts a lot of compromises. In addition to her work, she spends the day preparing a meal for her husband’s boss, and she doesn’t mention her frustrations or her opinions to him. As a director, I sometimes have to do things I find unpleasant. Why is sex so different?"
The movie seems to have a clear message: Anne envies Charlotte and Alice while the two girls seek the security Anne appears to be taking for granted. Amazed by the students seeming 'know better', their confidence and guilt-free enthusiasm, Anne questions her stable, bourgeois existence. In an interview for Indiewire Binoche, says, "Anne is not feeling fulfilled. She's envious in a way of those young girls’ freedom, and yet understanding it’s not that freeing, it’s damaging". On the other hand the story reveals that beyond the need to sustain themselves as students, acquire luxury items, as Binoche puts it in another interview for the New York Times online, Charlotte and Alice's need to prostitute themselves, "is related to a protection they’re looking for, and they can’t feel. There’s something in the structure of their heart that is not stable".
Elle met with mixed reviews at its premiere at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival as well as in Europe with Variety's Rob Nelson commenting, "A typically smart performance by Juliette Binoche isn't enough to keep "Elles" from drowning in pseudo-intellectual pretension and general banality". In the US, Film School Rejects' Kate Erbland considers Szumowska's plot and film's aims to be "perhaps too simple" and unsatisfying, and the comparisons of all women being prostitutes to be basic, "I shudder to think what Elles would be like without Juliette Binoche" she adds.
Chosen to feature at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival as part of the Spotlight section, festival programmer Paige Blake remarks, "filmmaker Malgoska Szumowska, strikes a delicate balance between explicit and intimate, deftly depicting the entangled female experience as it exists within the domestic sphere". Kate Erbland praises Szumowska for her energetic directing and the non-linear style of the storytelling, "Elles flits between Anne's assumed present and back to her past meetings with the two girls, which then give over scenes depicting the stories the girls have told Anne. [...] The film succeeds technically and shows great promise in its director - she just needs better, more mature material". Bullett Media's Henry Giardina agrees, and writes, "The most powerful thing about Elles is the cutting, which shifts from scenes of dialogue between Anne and the girls, to the girls and their clients, to the girls having sex for fun to Anne at home, preparing a dinner for her husband’s boss, to porn, to Anne on the floor of her bathroom, masturbating. Classical music plays often, and loudly, throughout".
Screening across the US:
Elles is now open in New York at the Angelika Film Center and is now touring through: California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Washington DC. For more information see: Kino Lorber
Malgorzata Szumowska - born in 1973. Director of internationally acclaimed feature films Happy Man, Stranger, and 33 Scenes from Life for which she won the Silver Leopard winner at Locarno, as well as a number of short documentaries. She served as a co-producer on Lars von Trier's Antichrist. Before attending the National Film School in Łódź, she studied art history at the Jagiellonian University.
According to the New York Times, Binoche plans to work with Szumowska on another film Sisters
Elles - directed by Malgorzata Szumowska; written by Tine Byrckel and Szumowska; director of photography, Michal Englert; edited by Françoise Tourmen and Jacek Drosio; art direction by Pauline Bourdon; costumes by Katarzyna Lewinska; produced by Marianne Slot. In French and Polish, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
WITH: Juliette Binoche (Anne), Anaïs Demoustier (Charlotte), Joanna Kulig (Alicja), Louis-Do de Lencquesaing (Patrick), François Civil (Florent) , Pablo Beugnet (Stéphane) and Jean-Marie Binoche (Anne’s father).
Author: Marta Jazowska
Sources: Kino Lorber, Indiewire, The New York Times, Tribeca Film Festival, Film School Rejects, Bullett Media