At the start of Coralie Fargeat’s debut film Revenge, Jen, the protagonist, could be an image plucked from a feminist’s nightmare. Jen (Matilda Lutz) first appears as a twenty-something proto-Barbie doll, sucking on a pink lollipop while hanging off the arm of her wealthy lover, Richard (Kevin Janssens), hyper-stylised in a frilly pink top and Lolita-esq sunglasses. The two are enjoying an illicit getaway in Richard’s lush desert villa, a day before his friends, the oily Stan (Vincent Colombe) and oafish Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède), are set to arrive for their annual hunting trip. Though Jen is scheduled to leave before the arrival of Richard’s friends – thus keeping their affair a secret – Stan and Dimitri arrive early. Richard unsuccessfully tries to convince his friends that Jen is just ‘a friend’. They eye her lustfully.
After a night of raucous partying, during which Jen remains an object of attention rather than participatory subject, Stan takes advantage of Jen’s friendliness to corner her into forced conversation, despite her visible discomfort, and rapes her. When Richard comes home and attempts to ‘fix’ the situation – a wealthy man always finds a way – his plans go awry when Jen refuses to accept his hush money. A cat-and-mouse game between man and woman then begins: Jen runs away into the desert in a desperate attempt to escape from Richard’s demands for her silence and he and his friends chase after her. Richard, Stan and Dimitri finally corner her at the edge of a cliff and just when it appears that Richard will accede to Jen’s demands he pushes her over the edge and leaves her for dead.
Or so Richard and his friends think. There’s a miraculous resurrection, complete with psychedelic trances and a giant tattoo of a phoenix, and then the LA-loving Jen is gone and an angry, vengeful Jen is in her place. The men back at the mansion, foolishly lugging around their hunting guns, had better watch out.
Many critics have commented on the violent, blood-soaked gore of Fargeat’s film: bright-red splatters are vibrantly and liberally used as visual foils to the clinical whiteness of Richard’s house and the undifferentiated beiges of the desert. Fargeat intended for the film to be a ‘revenge movie’ in the vein of Kill Bill and Mad Max and it shows: Revenge is unforgivingly graphic in its depiction of the consequences of cruelty and vindication. But Revenge is as much a jarringly smart exploration of gendered violence as it is a slasher spectacle. Richard, Stan, and Dmitri could each be the three major archetypes in the pantheon of terrible men. There’s the dopey coward with no moral backbone; the vengeful ‘nice guy’ who confuses basic social niceties with an unequivocal right to sex; and, finally, the alpha ‘golden boy’ who will make you feel like you are the most special girl in the world until you become an inconvenience. The moments leading up to Jen’s rape are straight from the abuser’s playbook, from Stan furiously citing Jen’s previously flirtatious behaviour to his faux-helpless assertions that she is too beautiful to resist. The subliminal message of his words, chillingly familiar to women everywhere, is this: you remain responsible for the horrors inflicted on you by the unforgiving and lecherous world.
Compared to the male characters of Revenge, Jen remains an enigmatic abstraction. At the start of the film, she professes some vague desire to move to Los Angeles and get ‘noticed’, while Fargeat’s camerawork lingers over her body in its unabashedly girly bikini with male gaze objectification. Afterwards, Jen transforms into a blood-soaked warrior on a mission for both survival and vindication. Her ‘I Love LA’ shirt is burned in a pyre, and she strips down to her underwear.¹ In both cases Jen is less a fully fleshed-out individual than an avatar for ‘womanhood’ at its extremities. Sex kitten and gun-toting warrior, different as they may seem, both belong to the male imagination. One, to the chauvinist, is a dream, and the other a nightmare. In occupying both, Jen brings us to grapple with the essential and very difficult question of how an individual woman can gain complete freedom from the patriarchy. Luce Irigaray, after all, famously observed that the very symbolic order of our world is built upon the male gaze masquerading as the ‘universal subject’.² Within this patriarchal set-up, performing ‘womanhood’ becomes both an empowering and compromising act; it offers us room for self-definition and assertion, while also inevitably bringing us in relation to the supposedly ‘neutral’ – but ultimately masculine – other, no matter how much we try to go beyond it.
Jen, by taking on the most extreme possibilities of womanhood, speaks to the emptiness of ‘empowerment’ discourse popular today, which understands freedom as the individual ability to ‘choose’ to overcome structural barriers. Although Jen transforms into a ruthless warrior, her violence is inflicted out of bare necessity; her narrative remains ultimately driven by the actions of men, and the triumphalism of her bloody rampage is qualified by the film’s nod to her desperate situation. Jen is abandoned in an isolated stretch of desert, and her only company are the very men who have tried to ruin her life, and want her dead. While some critics have accused Revenge of indulging in exploitative, aestheticised violence in the vein of Quentin Tarantino, Fargeat’s film stands apart from the likes of Kill Bill in the direction of its critique. Tarantino’s films invite the viewer to look down from on high into a tightly-wound, hyper-stylised universe and whoop in delight at the deaths of its dastardly, comically evil villains. Revenge, however, is a much more existentially unsettling film that could be set anywhere, with characters so personally resonant that they could be any man or woman you know from everyday life. Its violence, most chillingly, implicates us all.
‘Rape revenge’ movies are often easily satisfied: the final act of vengeance is offered as an easy, final resolution to a woman’s individual struggle, as seen in the archetypical I Spit On Your Grave series, as well as in the more prolific films, Kill Bill and Straw Dogs. Revenge complicates this narrative by offering its viewers both the pleasures of schadenfreude in seeing piggish men at the mercy of female vengeance, but stops from condescending to purport this vengeance amounts to ‘emancipation’ in of itself. Put simply: it’s about a young girl navigating power, but not Girl Power!. Even after her transformation, Jen is still bound to define her journey against men – particularly the ones who caused her traumatising and unforgettable emotional harm. As Luce Irigaray noted, there is no ‘quick fix’ to escape from the existing structures of womanhood; you cannot escape history. But you can build from it. When we see Jen looking at Richard’s house with her gun in tow, we too are confronted with the question of what self-definition can look like after such chaotic and uproarious violence; old systems can be torn down, but how does one start anew?
1 The ambiguities surrounding Jen’s transformation are discussed in critical receptions of the film. Reviews have observed that Jen remains barely-clothed throughout Revenge, begging the question: is she a feminist avatar or revenge, or another scantily-clad male fantasy? Coralie Fargeat discusses this decision in an interview with Jezebel, stating, “It was also important for me that she doesn’t cover up in the second half. I didn’t want to convey the idea that she was going to be strong because she now has clothes on.” The fact that both sides have a point demonstrates the difficulty of presenting a female body that exists independently from the male gaze. 2 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
Rebecca Liu is a freelance writer living in London. She is an editor for Kings Review, and tweets at @becbecliuliu
