When ‘Elles’ Started Conversations Instead of Whispers
When ‘Elles’ was released in 2011, it was more than just a film; it was a jolt. Helmed by Małgorzata Szumowska and starring the ever-fearless Juliette Binoche, this French–Polish drama movie walked into the most uncomfortable territory — women’s sexuality, autonomy, and class privilege — and made the world take notice. What began as an intimate character study of a Parisian journalist lost in her own desires while unraveling her subjects, ended up touching the cultural and social conversation around feminism, identity, and even fashion in more profound ways.
In India, where global indie cinema often finds its cult audience through late-night screenings and streaming buzz, ‘Elles’ quietly built its tribe. It wasn’t just in film clubs; it began to appear in essays, podcasts, Twitter threads and other discussions relating to modern womanhood. It is remarkable that a film set in Paris was able to resonate with Mumbai and Delhi apartments, where women were asking the same questions that Binoche’s Anne was asking: freedom, choices, and the cost of desire.
The Story That Made Everyone Uneasy—and Intrigued
Elles centers on Anne, a well-off journalist researching student sex workers. What begins as a detached academic endeavor ultimately becomes a reflection on Anne’s own life. While interviewing Charlotte (Anaïs Demoustier) and Alicja (Joanna Kulig), two young women sex workers, Anne’s bourgeois confidence begins to shatter. She starts to reconsider her marriage, motherhood, and repressed sensuality.
The storytelling oscillates between confession and confrontation. Szumowska’s moral universe is a grey one, inviting empathy and discomfort as co-participants. Some moments feel voyeuristic, others profoundly intimate. By the end, Elles is not about prostitution at all. It is about the journey of self-discovery in an emotionally exhausted world.
Binoche seemed to dish out an anguish both gentle and severe — a woman exposing more and more to herself while stripping her layers unaware of how raw she is to become. It wasn’t just a performance for her; she seemed to have inhabited her completely. And that is what made diverse audiences reflect: how many of us are living a curated existence and mistaking comfort for contentment?
When Real Lives and Reel Lives Converged
Juliette Binoche herself reflects the contradictions of her character. She is a world famous artist and also an artist who has changed the industry by turning down Hollywood to work on more avant garde films. She is more than willing to sacrifice market pay offs for artistic integrity. She remarked: “I don’t want to be a product; I want to be alive.” It is the very sentiment that Anne would have whispered while looking at her image in the mirror.
Reportedly, during the filming, Binoche asked Szumowska for further improvisation on the emotions. Many of the film’s silence, the most significant moments were unscripted, such as the way Anne looks at her husband with apathetic civility or the awkward intimacy of her night dinner scenes. The director has disclosed, “Juliette didn’t want to act Anne’s exhaustion. She wanted to feel it.”
In a similar manner, Joanna Kulig’s Alicja – confident, sensual, unapologetically independent, was inspired by real-life conversations Szumowska had with university students in Warsaw. Alicja became a lightning rod for feminist debates across Europe. Was she liberated or was she exploited? Was she strong or was she simply surviving? The ambiguity is what made her iconic.
For Kulig, who would later gain international fame for Cold War, Elles was a turning point. In an interview, she said the role shaped “how to look at shame differently.” That honesty is what made her one of the breakout stars of the film with a performance that was playful yet piercing. It is what contributed to the role of the film’s most significant star.
The Film That Bled Into Pop Culture
Elles is particularly remarkable in that it escaped the arthouse circuit and broke into everyday conversations. The film’s aesthetic—soft lighting, minimal makeup, and intimate close-ups—began to inspire indie fashions. Tumblr boards and Pinterest accounts were overflowing with images of Binoche in silk blouses, bare-faced, and half-smoked cigarettes. The “Elles look”—an effortless disheveled appearance, the self-studying, and the intellectual gaze—was a staple of women reclaiming their authenticity.
The film’s quotes took social media by storm. Phrases like “We are all selling something, even if it’s not our bodies” and “Freedom doesn’t come cheap” became pivotal lines of a generation defined by ambition and frailty, an anthem of sorts.
Elles can even be found in meme culture, where it is used for social critique. Users take Anne’s pensive, blank looks and layer them with text about burnout, modern romance, and existential crises. Thus, like all truly provocative works, Elles entered the popular consciousness without making a sound, and is all the more memorable for it.
A Feminist Storm in Slow Motion
At the directorial debut of the film ‘Elles’ at the film festival, there was mixed reception coming from the critics of the film. While some accounts described the film as uncompromisingly honest, others annotated the film as nothing more than an erotic exploitation of women. Most controversies revolving the film, however, gave the film and ‘Elles’ in particular, the opportunity to create and foster debates around the women’s representations in cinema and more specifically the media portrayal of women’s sexuality.
In the context of India, where feminism and cinema were intertwined and more than ripe for discussions in the 2010s, ‘Elles’ found even more pertinence. This time, it was female critics who contextualised the film with Lipstick Under My Burkha and Margarita with a Straw describing it as ‘a European echo of our own quiet revolutions.’ In women’s magazines, Binoche’s character was described as ‘the kind of woman Indian society is learning to tolerate — and fear.’
What made ‘Elles’ so powerful was its refusal to resolve. There was no atonement and there was no redemption on the part of the film. The film, in portraying the women, simply existed and like the women, it portrayed, was defiant.
Behind the Camera: The Risks That Paid Off
Director Małgorzata Szumowska welcomed ideas around provocation. With an exploration of ardent female sexuality in 33 Scenes from Life, as well as in Body and In the Name Of, she returned to this thematic territory. But with Elles, it was different — it wasn’t simply provocative; it was personal.
She used natural light and handheld cameras to evoke feelings of intimacy and discomfort. The crew later stated that Binoche’s character’s apartment was a real Parisian flat, and Szumowska purposefully chose it from among her friends. This was to give the story a sense of lived-in authenticity.
Notably, there were scenes shot with little to no crew. Actors were sometimes left alone with a video operator so that their interactions could be spontaneous. “It wasn’t about voyeurism,” Szumowska said, “It was about vulnerability – the kind that cinema dares to rarely show.”
The Ripple that Never Quite Faded
More than a decade later, Elles still feels ahead of it’s time. It’s influence is not only visible in feminist film discourse, but in the way it transformed visual storytelling focused on the female gaze. It was a film that said, vis-a-vis women: “you can now speak about desire, about power, about exhaustion unapologetically.”
Elles died down during the 2020 lockdown, only to be revived on streaming platforms. Viewers, old and new, were bombarded with clips and TikTok creators quoted Binoche’s monologues. Influencers recreated her looks, and feminist forums revisited the film’s themes. It was no longer just a film – it was a cultural moodboard.
“Elles” was not a milestone for Juliette Binoche; it was a declaration. She subsequently explained, “I didn’t make it to shock. I made it to remind women they are allowed to feel everything.”
Perhaps that is part of the reason why “Elles” remains relevant. Every few years, the world needs a story that gently yet emphatically proclaims a woman’s truth is hers to own, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.