'Elle' blazes a dark, unsettling path

"Inverted flame combustion." That's the kind of heat generated by a self-made furnace that makes a late cameo in Paul Verhoeven's highly flammable "Elle," a violently dark comedy in which passion and cruelty burn together in the same perverted, masochistic fire.

It begins startlingly, to say the least, with the muffled screams of rape. The noises have ceased when Verhoeven's camera first reveals a masked man, clad in black, standing up from the woman he has just assaulted on her floor. A cat quietly watches.

Other films might follow such an abrasive starting point with tears, revenge or justice. But the woman, Michele Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) we later learn is her name, catches her breath once her assailant has fled. She sweeps up the broken glass (with her heels still on), makes herself a bath and calmly orders in sushi before a visit from her son, Vincent (Jonas Bloquet).

That Michele isn't shattered by the encounter will lose some who understandably refuse to tolerate any imagining of rape that eludes devastation. Verhoeven, rebuffed by Hollywood, took to France to tell the story, adapted by David Birke from Philippe Dijan's novel "Oh ..." The Dutch-born director of "Basic Instinct" has long blurred misogynist exploitation with feminist empowerment.

"I supposed I was raped," Michele later tells her friends over dinner. Everyone's jaws drop. She's ready to hear the dinner specials.

Michele is too dispassionate for victimhood or, it turns out, many other emotions. As Verhoeven coolly, masterfully unspools the pulpy, dense layers of "Elle," her character comes into relief. With her longtime best friend Anna (Anne Consigny) she runs a successful literary-minded video game company in Paris. She lords over a small army of young, nebbish men. Not days after the rape, she's lecturing them that "the orgasmic convulsions" of a demon character are "way too timid."

There is much, much more. Michele is sleeping with her best friend's husband, despite loathing him; caressing her married neighbor's crotch under the dinner table; watching in vain as her son devotes himself to his vile girlfriend; growing jealous of her ex-husband's fling; and disapproving of her botoxed mother's affair with a young man.

On top of all this, Michele is the daughter of a mass murderer who, when Michele was 10, slaughtered everyone in their neighborhood. With her father locked away, she too remains a figure of public hate.

The twists and turns are enough to fill an especially daring season, or three, of a soap opera. And Huppert, her chin out, blazes through them all. Steely and impervious, the great French actress commands the film; no amount of kink can slow her down.