Here at TIFF there are three movies starring the amazing Isabelle Huppert, who seems to get better and better as she ages. I saw two of them — Mia Hansen-Love’s “Things to Come” and Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle.” “Elle” played to lots of controversy in Cannes, with some people hating it and others saying it was a strong feminist movie.

First, I was struck by the fact that I saw two films starring an actress of a certain age — and if she was American, do you think we’d see her starring in three movies? Not a chance.

Hansen-Love’s film is the story of a philosophy professor whose foundation becomes unmoored when her husband leaves her, and her mother, who was very depressed and needed a lot of attention, dies. This is a slice of life movie. Huppert’s Nathalie feels the freedom that she will have now that her kids are grown and her mother is dead. As she says to her star pupil who she is close to, “I am free.” Women are so rarely free. This movie is not about showing how sexy she is — it’s about showing how real she is, and that’s what makes her sexy.

In contrast, the infuriating “Elle” is all about how men view women and how men believe women are when we’re alone — or at least, how they want us to be. I guess I shouldn’t have expected much from Verhoeven since he gave us “Basic Instinct,” but I was intrigued.

First thing’s first, the whole movie is a trigger. If you can’t watch sexual violence, do not see this movie. The movie starts off with a violent rape. Huppert’s character, Michele, doesn’t tell anyone about it until several days later when she shares that she was assaulted, or as she puts it, “I suppose I was raped. ” She shares this information with her ex, her best friend (who is also her business partner), and her husband, and then continues the conversation as if she had just said she was buying brisket for dinner. While there is no standard behavior post-rape or sexual assault, this just came off as quite bizarre.

There is so much to unpack in this movie. It seems that the male writer and director are creating a woman who fulfills every single fantasy they can come up with, and they make her so fucked up that, at times, it is hard to be on her side. Michele is the CEO of a gaming company that designs games where women are objects and are brutalized. She pushes her all-male programming team to go farther and farther until they get to a “boner moment.” I’m serious. And it turns out her father is a serial killer and people think she was involved with the murders.

Spoilers here– the rapist turns out to be her neighbor. He rapes her several times, yet the filmmakers want us to believe that this somehow turns her on and that she wants to transform this into a consensual sexual relationship. So they play with what consent means and whether this guy is really at fault. That’s just not OK. Rape is never the survivors’ fault. It is always the rapists’ fault. So I don’t buy this whole ambiguous world of consent the film is trying to sell us.

Oh yeah, and her mother dies and makes one last request of her to go see her father. So she goes to prison and it turns out her father hanged himself when he found out she was coming. On her way back from the prison, she gets into a car accident and can’t reach her ex or her best friend (and by the way she is sleeping with her best friends husband), so she calls her rapist to get her out of the car she is trapped in.

This movie is so epically fucked up that words escape me. So many things appall me (his obsession with nipples being one), especially because people think that it’s actually a comedy. Paul Verhoeven said to the Guardian, “It’s rape and there is comedy.” I did not laugh once.

I think that people need to be very careful when thinking that rape can be a part of a comedy. There is so much assault in this movie that there was nothing comedic about it. I’m not buying the comedy and I am sure not buying how these men handled rape. It was a meaty role, so I understand why Huppert as an actress did it, but I wonder what Huppert the woman thought about it. I am not surprised if not a single American actress would touch this.

On the other hand, I completely bought into Hansen-Love’s depiction of Nathalie. No wonder she won the Silver Bear for best directing at Berlinale. She created a woman who is intellectually curious, deeply committed to her students, dealing with a mom who has mental illness and won’t get out of bed, and a husband who leaves her for a younger woman. When she is asked what’s next for her in the dating scene she is clear that women of her age are alone or with old men, and an old man does not interest her. She believed she was going to grow old with her husband, but that is not going to happen and she will figure it out as she goes along, as does everyone else.

I think the best example of why I found the movie so affecting is a simple scene. Nathalie’s daughter gives birth and Nathalie is in the room with her, holding her grandchild. The camera then shows her daughter laying on her side in the bed and she just starts crying. She says to her mother, “Please give me my baby,” in a flood of maternal emotions. It’s brief and you could miss it, but it hit me hard. That scene is a scene made by a woman and that’s what the whole movie is: A movie about a woman’s life through the vision of a woman.