Review: Revenge
I’ve got a bit of a guilty pleasure when it comes to revenge films, it’s the same guilt I feel with French horror movies. I know they’re both just excuses for extreme violence but a done well they can work passed that, utilising both a primal instinct to watch bad things happen to bad people and a modern sensibility of questioning just how broken a victim has to be to inflict this much damage to another person or persons. When I heard about a French Rape/Revenge movie literally Revenge and touting a feminist angle, well let’s just say I went into this with high hopes.
And boy did they deliver.
The film opens with Jen, a young American woman, and her French millionaire boyfriend Richard being flown out to Richard’s secluded home in the middle of the desert for a weekend away from Richard’s wife and kids before his annual hunting trip with his friends Stan and Dimitri. While they spend the weekend fucking away, Stan and Dimitri arrive early much to the annoyance of Richard who wanted to keep Jen a secret, however Jen quickly takes to his two friends and enjoys shamelessly flirting and teasing the night away.
Things quickly turn sour though when Richard has to take care of some errands leaving Jen alone with Stan and Dimitri, Stan takes Jen’s flirting too seriously and violent rapes her after she denies his advances. Upon Richard’s return he’s more concerned about his wife finding out about Jen if she files a police report than the actual rape, so in an effort to keep her quiet Richard pushes her off a cliff to try and kill her. Of course Jen survives by the laws of ‘Killing Rapist Scumbags’ and sets off on a mission of revenge, or die trying.
By definition of the genre you already know the main story points, the main heroine will be raped and left for dead but will come back and wreak great and terrible vengeance on her attackers. And that’s exactly what we get but it’s how everything is executed (often literally so) that makes it work so well, for starters the choice to have Jen flirt quite heavily with Stan puts a different spin to the reasoning behind the attack which fits perfectly in today’s victim blaming society while in the second half the slow-burn cat-&-mouse chase allowed the tension to be drawn out properly rather than just focussing on the extreme violence.
I mean the violence was still pretty fucking extreme but it paced well enough to make an impact.
Outside of a helicopter pilot and Richard’s unseen wife we spend the entire movie with just these four characters. Guillaume Bouchede and Vincent Colombe play Dimitri and Stan respectively, Dimitri initially comes across as just a fat idiot but his complete uncaring reaction to Stan’s attack and a surprising amount of smarts during the hunt for Jen showcases a different man than we’ve lead to believe. Likewise while Stan is the piece of shit rapist who attacks Jen for wanting nothing to do with him, as soon as things turn to attempted murder he loses the same bravado and becomes quite a timid and scared character, it’s an interesting turn but works just to show how much of a scumbag he really is, preying on those that can’t protect themselves but as soon as the tables are turned he’s a damned coward, this is a strong performance from Colombe who is actually so pathetic that during one sickening moment with a glass shard I caught myself almost feeling sorry for him.
Almost.
Kevin Janssens as Richard turns out to be the main villain of the piece, you’re not totally on board with him at the start considering he’s cheating on his wife but he’s doesn’t give off the feeling of total dickbag right away. It’s right at the moment where he casually pushes Jen to her attempted death that you see the real evil hiding away, Richard is cold fucking blooded and only gets worse as the film goes on. Surprisingly he treats Stan with a staggering amount of contempt, blaming him for putting them into this situation, whether he’s pissed that Stan has forced him to kill Jen to protect himself or if he’s genuinely regretful over being put into that position is unclear but Janssens captures that asshole mentality perfectly.
Star of the show has to go to Matilda Lutz as Jen though and not just because she’s tackling such a disturbing topic, though it certainly doesn’t hurt. What makes Jen such a great character is that unlike her contemporaries, there’s no sense of innocence lost with her, Jen literally enters the film sucking on a lollipop and then sucking on a dick before we’ve even heard a word out of her mouth. Between her skimpy underpants and her inch-too-short dresses, Jen is a legitimate male fantasy come to life, impossibly hot and damn does she know it, happily sleeping with a married man and shamelessly flirting with everyone around her. But that’s just the first act, after her rape and near-death Jen is left broken and bloodied in more than just a physical way, watching her slowly rebuild herself into something more far brutal and cold than she was before is such a change that I often had time recognising the two sides as the one character.
Even just from an objective standpoint this is a much tougher role than you initially think for one thing I don’t think Lutz said a single word after her attempted murder and she wasn’t saying all that much to begin with, the willing sex object she portrayed at the start of the film had no desire to talk while the broken warrior she was at the end had no need to. And trust me when Is ay broken is the optimum word, throughout the film Jen is raped, impaled, disfigured, burnt, shot, beaten and all manner of horrid violence wrought upon her and Lutz sells the hell of how much Jen is put through and how hardened she is by her long and painful recovery.
First-time director Coralie Fargeat manages to tackle the difficult subject of rape/revenge through some very clever directing choices, as I said at the start it’s the execution that makes this film work and it’s Fargeat with the gun in her hand. Starting with the very strange declaration of a Feminist Rape/Revenge movie, the way Fargeat manages to make that statement work is very clever, for most of the first act Jen is treated like a sex object, the camera almost licking her from head to toe as she walks around in skimpy underwear and near-enough Lap-Dancing Stan during an early party scene, she knows exactly what she is and more importantly, so does Fargeat.
The important questions raised about Jen’s character all stem from who she is at the start of the film, is she exercising her right as a free woman to be as sexually liberated as she likes or is she already an unaware victim teasing the predators around her without even realising it? Too often in today’s society you hear of a rape victim being blamed for ‘Wanting it’ or ‘Being a tease’, well Jen is a shameless tease but in no way does that justify what happens to her, it does not justify what happens to any woman no matter how sexually open they are. Despite how sexualised Fargeat makes Jen through the first act she cleverly doesn’t sexualise the actual rape, instead focussing on the much more disturbing act of Dimitri hearing Jen’s screams and actively ignoring them, even turning up the TV to drown them out.
Even so the sexualisation does continue onwards, just in a very different light. Towards the second half, after Jen recovers and sets out on her revenge mission, she’s clad in a black bra and panties and a knife belt, looking very much like a darker version of Ursula Andress from Dr. No only carrying a massive gun and caked in blood and dirt, there’s still a sexual element but it designed to make you step back and re-evaluate your thoughts. The same goes for the finale which finds Richard spending the last 20+ minutes totally nude running around house with a shotgun, now the sexual gaze has been flipped on its head but even that gets twisted even further once Richard’s very naked body gets very bloody.
Speaking of which, this film is so damn bloody, to the point where it’s totally unbelievable but that is al intentional, if Jen surviving a branch through her abdomen didn’t tell you what type of film this is then her cauterising the wound and being branded with a phoenix logo should, this is as unsubtle as you can get but it’s fitting towards the excess of this film, from the shot of an ant being drowned in blood to a rather harsh punch to a shot-gun wound, blood literally pours from this film (Jen’s pulsing stomach would being a particularly difficult watch) and all the style, all the symbolism, all of it plays into what type of film this is. Even from the start with a very neon inspired soundtrack and a heightened cinematography that overly-contrasts the screen so the colours are near-blinding you know this isn’t going for the gritty, morally grey approach, this is pure extremism and it’s all the better for it. The entire third act carries through a mountain pass with Jen and Stan each trying to one-up each other with little room for error and no way of turning back, slowly building up the tension before leading right into the finale at Richard’s house where Jen and her attackers are caught in a claustrophobic circle trying to get behind the other whilst making sure nobody sneaks up on them, it’s one of the best tension scenes I’ve seen in a while since Fargeat makes sure you can never really tell where anyone is in relation to each other but knowing that eventually they will crash together in a bloody mess. From the shot of an ant being drowned in blood to a rather harsh punch to a shot-gun wound, blood literally pours from this film with Jen’s second act recovery being really tough to watch, I won’t go into too much detail but all I’ll say is that when he wound starts pulsing you know this is not your average revenge movie.
As much as guilt as I have with revenge movies, I know going into Revenge that I would enjoy it, but I wasn’t expecting how much, in a time when woman are gaining the courage to speak out and still being victimised for it, this socially conscious storyline manages to capture the very real fear women have of being attacked just for being themselves and injects it into an absurdist, overly sexual, overly violent, overly stylised piece of brilliance. This is a must-see for Genre fans this year and should easily stand out as one of the ballsiest films of the year and rightly so.
9/10