Billed as “a provocative exploration of female sexuality,” NC-17-rated French import Elles is a self-satisfied, ponderous drama that can’t be saved by a characteristically strong and nuanced performance from Juliette Binoche. A would-be character study desperately in search of interesting characters, director Malgoska Szumowska’s film comes across as a plodding and muddled adaptation of a didactic women’s studies term paper.



Binoche stars as Anne, a French magazine journalist in the finishing stages of an article on young women ostensibly subsidizing their higher educations through prostitution. Pledging confidentiality, Anne gets the girls — French-born Lola (Anais Demoustier) and Polish exchange student Alicja (Joanna Kulig) — to open up about their work, and what led them to the sex-for-money trade. Lola, whose real name is Charlotte, describes some of the tension it creates in the relationship with her boyfriend Thomas (Arthur Moncla), while confessing that one can “get used to the money.” Both girls also note the level of organization their job requires. Some of their reminiscences with Anne are rendered in flashback, which (heavily) breathes erotic life into their descriptions.

Co-written by Tine Byrckel and director Szumowska, Elles aims as much for a stirring of the head as the loins, if not more so. Possessing a lively energy and flitting eyes, Binoche richly imbues Anne with the sort of complex interior life at which the script only hints. In addition to the requisite masturbation scene, a drunken dinner sequence between Anne and Alicja marks Binoche as perhaps the only actress in recent memory brave enough to spit up chewed food in deranged delirium. A shame, then, that Elles doesn’t serve as a better vehicle for her efforts, but instead builds to a ridiculous climax of all-caps Artistic Statement. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Kino Lorber, NC-17, 99 minutes)