Initially, I was not planning on seeing Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2018).
The first I’d heard of the picture was while my wife and I were at Santa Monica, CA’s Aero Theater for a screening of Escape from New York (John Carpenter, 1981) and The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979). When the trailer for Revenge hit the screen, the crowd got really excited, but I sort of shrugged my shoulders at it. Not because the entire movie seemed to be given away in the trailer (which it is), but because it was framed and, as I discovered later after doing some research, being marketed as the latest and greatest addition to the rape-revenge canon.
I’ve seen a few of the films that are held up as paragons of the rape-revenge genre: Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972), They Call Her One-Eye (Bo Arne Vibenius, 1973), and I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978). I’ve seen such highfalutin examples as Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960) (the film upon which Craven’s Last House was based) and Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999) (based on William Shakespeare’s play, Titus Andronicus). I’ve also seen countless movies — too many to list— that are not strictly rape-revenge, but do feature sexual assault in one form or another. While glad that I saw them, I don’t count them as being among my favorite viewing experiences.
My attitude toward seeing the picture changed soon after, because I was able to attend a pre-release screening at the Aero Theater with the director, Coralie Fargeat, and the star, Mathilda Lutz, in attendance. It was playing as part of a quadruple bill along with The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005), Mad Max: Fury Road - Black & Chrome (George Miller, 2015), and Aliens (James Cameron, 1986). I mean...c’mon!...how could I resist?!
I’m really glad that I went. Revenge was much better than I imagined it would be. (Which, really, is a lesson that I should have learned by now. Books, covers, judging...and all that.) Revenge may be a dish that is best served cold (at least according to the Klingons), but Coralie Fargeat has served up a steaming hot plate fairly overflowing with bloody, meaty retribution.
Let’s take a closer look…
Red Band trailer. You have been warned.
(Note: There was a mix-up with the digital projection when I saw it. Many of the characters speak French throughout the movie, but the subtitles were not turned on for the first 10 minutes or so. I might have missed quite a bit of exposition at the start of the picture, but, in the end, it wasn’t necessary.)
The movie opens with Richard (Kevin Janssens) and Jen (Mathilda Lutz) flying in a helicopter across the desert. They arrive at a secluded, modernistic house. After the lovers disembark from the helicopter, the pilot gives Richard as a gift a small package containing peyote. And to think, whenever I fly I only get a package of pretzels at best!
Richard, it turns out is married, Jen is his mistress, and this trip to the middle of nowhere is an opportunity for them to spend some time together before Richard’s friends show up for their annual hunting trip. Richard and Jen only get the house (and each other) to themselves for a little while, because Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) arrive a day early, guns in hand. Whoops! Guess someone should have put a sock on the door knob!
The foursome party throughout the night with Jen, wanting to be friendly to Richard’s friends, leading the charge. Mucho boozo is consumed — enough that I was getting a contact buzz just watching the picture! At one point, tackling the peyote is discussed, but Richard claims that it is an extremely potent and dangerous blend. Apparently, a guy Richard knows who partook of it, engaged in a little self-surgery without realizing it until it was too late! (Foreshadowing alert!) Instead of letting Stan and Dimitri gets their mitts on it, Richard asks Jen to hide it so no one can find it. Out of sight of the men, she places it in a locket she is wearing.
The next day, with hangovers in full effect, Jen finds herself alone with Stan and Dimitri. Richard has left in order to get their hunting paperwork in order. Dimitri is floating around in the pool in a post-drunken haze, leaving Stan and Jen to entertain each other, something the young woman is loath to do. She politely gives Stan the brush-off (not in a cold, calculated way, but in a “well, it sure was nice meeting you, but I gotta go pack so I can leave you guys to shoot defenseless animals for fun” kind of way). Stan does not appreciate being told he is not Jen’s type. He follows her and corners her in her room. Enter Dimitri, who, while unwilling to join Stan, is equally unwilling to stop him. Instead, he closes the bedroom door behind him as he walks back to the living room to watch tv and eat chocolate. Jen screams as Stan rapes her (an act that the audience does not witness); Dimitri turns up the volume on the tv to block it all out.
Later, when Richard returns, he finds the men sitting in the living room looking chagrined and Jen holed up in the bedroom. While he is angry at Stan, he doesn’t do himself any favors in Jen’s (or the audience’s) eyes as he offers to pay her off and relocate her from Los Angeles to Canada. (Who needs the City of Angels when you have chance to live in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, am I right?) Jen, of course, refuses the bribe. She tries to run away, but the men chase her down to the edge of a cliff. Trapped, Jen demands that she be allowed to leave. Richard gains Jen’s trust by pretending to call the helicopter pilot. He gets close to her, then shoves her over the cliff’s edge. Jen lands on her back on a tree, impaling herself. Richard, Stan, and Dimitri leave the scene, nonplussed, because...well...there's hunting to go and do. I mean, those defenseless animals aren’t going to hunt themselves.
This is when things take a turn for the weird and the mythic.
Jen doesn’t let being a human shish kabab get in her way. Heck, she doesn’t even let being a human ant farm get in her way. Showing an amount of moxie and ingenuity that makes John Rambo look like Julius Kelp, Jen disengages herself from the tree and makes her escape.
Meanwhile, les trois stooges go back to the cliff to make sure Jen is really dead. (One wonders if this is how the hunting trip would have gone: animals are shot at but only checked on much later to see if they've been hit.) All they find of Jen is a trail of blood leading out into the desert.
And, at that point, the hunt is on.
I’ll stop here with the plot summary. If you’ve seen the trailer, then none of this should be a shock. Past this point, there be tygers. Fargeat really starts turning the thumbscrews on the characters and the audience once the men realize they have to run Jen to ground. And you just know that, at some point, Jen is going to turn the tables on the men. They don’t call the movie Revenge for nothing, after all.
There are some wonderful set pieces throughout the film: Jen’s peyote-induced self-surgery in the cave, Stan’s one-man battle with a piece of glass in his foot (which is queasily played for gut-busting laughs as well as gut-churning screams), and the chase through the house between Jen and Richard (who is chasing whom?!) are all excellent.
The color palette and the setting are what really make Revenge something to see, especially on the big screen. Fargeat’s choice to place the action in the middle of the desert lends a sense of otherworldliness to the proceedings. The vast flatness of the environment makes Revenge feel like a play on the world’s biggest stage. The setting dwarfs the characters while at the same time makes their actions seem larger than life. It’s a fascinating irony. The colors, too, make the action seem strange and heightened. Fargeat chose bright colors that make everything seem as though it were drenched in neon. Like the setting, the colors make the characters and their actions seem utterly fake and all too real at the same time.
Trailer for Revenge that features actual
comments made by men. Hilarious.
There has been a lot of talk in critical circles about how revolutionary and revelatory Revenge is. More experienced filmgoers may wonder what all the hubbub is about. Anyone who has seen any of the rape-revenge movies mentioned above will feel a sense of déja vu when watching Revenge. They may even feel it necessary to ask why Revenge is being considered a feminist classic and a big middle finger to rape culture while pioneering films like Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981) and I Spit On Your Grave (both much stronger versions of Revenge) were considered exploitative trash when released (and still are now, decades later, for all I know).
The reason that Revenge has been taken to the bosom of modern film audiences is simple: the culture is changing. As I write this, the Los Angeles Times has announced that former Hollywood bigwig, Harvey Weinstein, has been indicted by a grand jury in New York on rape and sexual assault charges. Women who have had to suffer in silence for years — decades even (think on that for a moment...living in fear and silence for DECADES) — no longer have to feel as though they are alone. The culture of #TimesUp and #MeToo is changing the way the topic of sexual assault is discussed and the way that victims feel about themselves. A new culture in which victims of rape — 1 out of every 6 women and 1 out of every 33 men — no longer have to feel afraid is being created right before our eyes. That new culture is going to be the soil out of which new (and hopefully better) art will grow. It will also be the glass through which we will see already existing art anew — for better and for worse.
Art does not exist in a vacuum. I don’t know of anyone who would think of talking about a book, a movie, a poem, a painting without talking about the wider world in which it is a part. A good movie should be in conversation with its generic predecessors and with the cultural upheavals of its time.
For instance, when I saw Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017), I couldn’t help but be reminded of other films: Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966), and The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975) to name only a few. Not all viewers caught the references, but instead saw Get Out as a call-to-arms for the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
If a moviegoer sees Revenge and doesn't recognize the echoes of I Spit On Your Grave, The Virgin Spring, Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), and a host of other flicks in it, then maybe they'll see it as a feminist call-to-arms and the ultimate film of the #MeToo movement. Either way the movie is doing its job.
Revenge may not be the best or most original (a word I find to be troublesome at the very least, but I'll save that conversation for another blog post) action thriller out there, but what it lacks in cinematic innovation, it more than makes up for in style, chutzpah (that “glass in the foot” scene! AAAAARRRGHHH!!!), and timeliness. Revenge, like Get Out, is the perfect movie for its moment. While not quite as good as Jordan Peele’s movie, Revenge is still a pretty entertaining ride.
Now, where did my steel-bottomed boots get to...
Stan (Vincent Colombe) being a big baby.
