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Movies & TV

Rape, reality and TIFF

Already you can feel the tension rising. With Canada still reeling over Jian Ghomeshi’s acquittal and Americans wringing their hands over the rape allegations against comedy icon Bill Cosby, TIFF has programmed Paul Verhoeven’s appalling provocation Elle, about a woman apparently turned on by her rapist.

The idea, I presume, is to piss a lot of people off – including women who have been fighting violence against women for decades – and generate some hot debate. Woohoo! Angry females against a guy just trying to tell an arty story. Freedom of artistic expression and all that.

But then the real world moved in to up the stakes. TIFF snapped up Nate Parker’s slave rebellion story, The Birth Of A Nation, hoping the fest could reprise its 12 Years A Slave Oscar triumph, only to find out that director/writer/star Parker has been dogged by rape charges. He was acquitted of sexual assault over a decade ago. The man charged with him was found guilty, but had his conviction overturned. The woman who accused them committed suicide in 2012.

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Reality has messed with director/actor Nate Parker’s plans for The Birth of A Nation.

The arguments are raging. Do we separate the artist from the work? It’s a question people have been asking for decades, whether about a misogynist Picasso or a kinda creepy Woody Allen. Note that it didn’t seem to matter to Hollywood that Allen got it on with his stepdaughter, or that he was accused of abusing his daughter – they gave him a Oscar nom the year those allegations were made.

Should people see Parker’s movie or should they boycott it? The American Film Institute has cancelled a screening in L.A. Will there be demonstrations here? Not exactly what TIFF had in mind.

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At least Isabelle Huppert relates well to her cat in Elle.

As festival organizers gear up for both the Parker and Verhoeven controversies, note that the fest has programmed a number of films on the theme of sexual assault that promise a more nuanced approach.

In Una (first screening September 14, 9:30 pm, Princess of Wales), Rooney Mara plays a woman who confronts the man who raped her when she was 13. It asks the question, what if the monster you knew as a teen is now a completely different person?

Graduation (first screening September 9, 5:30 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 2) features a sexual assault that threatens to derail a young girl’s academic future. And in The Arbitration (first screening September 13, 8:15 pm, Isabel Bader), a woman who accuses her ex of rape is vilified as just a jilted ex-lover (shades of the Ghomeshi trial). 

But regardless of these less incendiary entries, Verhoeven’s weird thriller-cum-revenge-pic will get the most attention. It’s a nasty piece about Michèle, who suffers a vicious sexual assault at the hands of a masked intruder. Turns out she’s not the most sympathetic character. She heads up a very successful company that makes video games and is especially proud of her latest release, whose hero is a serial rapist. 

She’s sleeping with her best friend and business partner’s husband – with whom she has sex in her office barely a day after the attack. (As if.) And when she discovers the identity of her assailant, she gets really turned on.

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Anatomy Of Violence, with Janki Bisht, dramatizes an infamous rape, probing its root causes.

Compare that approach to Deepa Mehta’s Anatomy Of Violence (first screening September 12, 7 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 1, see review). It probes the 2012 gang rape of a young woman – her boyfriend was forced to watch – by six men on a Delhi bus, which sparked outrage in India and beyond. By combining fact and fiction, Mehta seeks to discover what motivated the assailants. Where do they come from?

She heads into the streets and into their homes to find out. There she uncovers crushing poverty, sexual and physical abuse, desperation and rage. In a way, Anatomy Of Violence is a way more daring film than Verhoeven’s Elle, showing uncommon compassion for the violators and pressing for fundamental change in a society guaranteed to intensify woman hatred. 

Oh, and Mehta doesn’t show the actual assault – at all. Verhoeven, on the other hand, treats us to more than five sexual violations – not including those animated sequences from the video game.

They’re not sexy to the viewer, by the way and, at first, not to the victim. But then circumstances change that.

I’ve already engaged in a number of discussions with male critics who love Elle. One thought it was a satire. The video game aspect probably is, but the idea that rape ought to be fodder for fun denies the painful facts of violence against women. No one would treat racism this way. A slave loving the whip? Gimme a break.

Another appreciated the way the film turns the tables on the viewer, a stance only a male viewer would have the luxury of maintaining. Those of us who have been sexually assaulted or threatened with sexual assault – which is just about every woman – know that the lived experience has nothing to do with being aroused. 

Another made the argument that the movie, in which Michèle does seek revenge, is about how important it is to re-examine our attitude toward sexual assault survivors as merely victims. 

Actually, we don’t need Verhoeven to teach us how not to make women victims. Activists are doing that work in a reality-based way: we want young girls to learn self-defence so that men will know that every woman has the power to fight back. We want the justice system to provide accusers with the resources to make their cases so we can improve the conviction rate from its current, pathetic less than 10 per cent. 

And we’re resisting rape culture. How would I define that term? A rape culture takes seriously those who defend a film that suggests that women get off on sexual assault .

There’s something delicious about the fact that the Verhoeven controversy might easily be eclipsed by the allegations against Parker. Here are the TIFF programmers assuming that art will charge up the debate on sexual assault – only to find reality getting in the way.

And I’m not convinced we should be debating sexual assault anyway. We should just be trying to end it.

susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole

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