Isabelle Huppert on 'Elle': 'I Think It's a Difficult Film to Watch for Everybody'

Isabelle Huppert is opening up about her controversial new movie Elle.

In the film, the 63-year-old French actress plays Michèle, a sexual assault survivor who develops a strange, thrilling relationship with her rapist.

By doing so, Michèle decides she will not become a powerless victim.

“I think she’s a very new character,” Isabelle told Elle magazine. “She’s a kind of prototype character. She’s like a new car that hasn’t existed before. She’s a new person, in a way. You certainly wouldn’t meet her on the subway, nor would you meet in her in any other fiction. It’s a bit like a fairy tale on one hand, but it’s also very, very realistic. That’s what’s so disturbing about the film. Maybe the woman does not exist, but she could exist.”

“I think it’s a difficult film to watch for everybody,” she went on. “At the beginning we heard the film was defined as a ‘rape comedy’ and we said, ‘Rape comedy?’ You can’t make a rape comedy, [but] the movie is also funny. That’s a different thing. Most of the time, it is funny. That doesn’t mean the rape is funny. The rape is a rape. It’s very brutal, it’s very disturbing. It’s difficult to watch for anybody. It’s a fantasy and it doesn’t make any statement about the rape. It’s a story, you know?”

“But for her, what is interesting objectively, she doesn’t take it as a tragedy,” Isabelle added. “That’s how unpredictable she is. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t, in itself, a tragedy. It’s a tragedy, and he has to be punished. By the time you get the end, you understand that the movie is moral in that way.”

Also pictured inside: Isabelle attending an Afternoon Tea in Celebration of Elle hosted by Sony Pictures Classics on Friday (November 18) in New York City.

15+ pictures inside of Isabelle Huppert at the event…