REVENGE (2017), and the fight to live and survive in a world hostile to your existence
Seven years before THE SUBSTANCE, Carolie Fargeat put her name on the map with this gorily gnarly, fiercely feminist debut.
- “Maybe it’s not too late. We can take her to a hospital, say it was an accident. We’ll get lawyers. They’ll think of something. They always do.”
- “We call no-one. We say nothing. What’s your problem? She’s alone, her guts hanging out. There are 3 of us, and we’re armed. What are you afraid of?”
Had she made her blisteringly brutal debut feature back in the 2000’s, Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge would have easily ranked high among the exemplars of the New French Extremity movement of the era. A time period the film feels like a loving throwback to, in its uncompromisingly gritty yet heightened style, and its lashings upon lashings of blood by the gory gallon. (I don’t know if it’s quantifiably measurable, but it sure feels like it gives 2007’s notorious Inside a run for its money when it comes to a French horror film’s outrageous splattery spillage of crimson.)
Whether it’s Martyrs, Switchblade Romance (a.k.a. High Tension), Trouble Every Day, In My Skin, Frontier(s), or Inside… you name it, Revenge would comfortably rub shoulders with any of those New French Extremity heavy-hitters, and probably best a few of them, too.
But amidst the harkening back to the NFE era, as well as what feels like some nice homagery to John Carpenter (that bravura looooong Steadicam tracking shot! that ear-candy synth score by Rob, of Maniac (2012) fame!), and her using her cine-literacy to ably dip her toes into the simultaneous genre waters of neo-Westerns, action-thrillers, survival dramas, and of course most prominently, rape-revenge exploitations, Fargeat alchemises all these ingredients to her own exhilarating ends to make something fresh, vital, and elemental in its righteous fury and bodily viscera.
The incredible, dedicated Matilda Lutz portrays betrayed protagonist Jen with effortless consistency, bridging both sides of her character as one believable whole through the tortuous trials that transform her - as MUBI puts it - “from Barbie to badass.”
Fargeat pulls a canny trick in initially objectifying Jen - or rather, having her be someone comfortable with objectifying herself - by shooting her in a manner you’d expect from someone like Michael Bay - i.e. all ass, all the time. (I exaggerate, but only just.) She puts you in the headspace and the eyes of the men lustfully desiring this woman as a sexual fantasy for their gratification. But Fargeat never lets it be mistaken that what these men think of Jen, and what they do to her, is dehumanising, patriarchally possessive, and disgusting to the nth degree.
These three men are some of the most despicable, hateful scumbags around, and it’s only worsened by how believable they are in their misogynistic attitudes and casual violence. Richard (Kevin Janssens) is a dead-eyed psychopath; Stan (Vincent Colombe) is an insecure entitled snivelling spineless bastard; and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) is the third wheel dullard, there to facilitate and help the men around him do whatever they want.
To them, Jen is just the girl who’s there, mattering only when she makes their dicks twitch, or when she’s a problem to dispose of for the sake of their status quo. Sex and violence are inherently ingrained as intertwined heads of a horrific hydra within men like these, and it’s not for nothing that Fargeat two or three times makes a point of cutting from a shot of the men ogling Jennifer’s body (Megan Fox unrelated), to a shot of a wrestling match playing on the TV. Physical lust and physical domination are one and the same to these men, one feeding into the other, carnality and brutality all smeared into a sport for proving their masculinity via who controls the most. Jen is unfortunate enough to be made the pawn in their pathetic game, which they think they’ve won.
But through fiery, bloody, agonising rebirth, Jen emerges to haunt and hunt them down, making them pay for their sins in terrifically suspenseful cat-and-mouse war for survival in the harsh desert landscape - a vast, desolate, dusty canvas, ready to be painted with their blood.
Something that Revenge made me re-think about is a subject that’s come to mind quite a lot for me over the years, that being the hypothetical scenario of how I’d react to living in the world as the opposite gender. If I was just suddenly plopped into inhabiting the body of a woman, knowing everything I know about the hardships and dangers and cruelties and injustices women face every day, my fear is that I would have a never-ending anxiety attack.
At the best of times, as your bog-standard cis-het white man, I already have the disposition of inherently thinking too much about what others think of me, and what I think of myself. But then I imagine this body-swap scenario where I exist as who I am right now, but in a woman’s body, and my over-analytical hyper-vigilant ways of thinking immediately start going into overdrive.1
I barely feel safe among other people out in the real world as it is, with my only comforts being that I’m just tall enough, quiet enough, unremarkable enough, and male enough to generally avoid attracting unwanted attention from those whose behaviours make me nervous. I benefit in this way from the patriarchal privilege I was born into as a man, and I know it. It is what it is.
So imagine if that meagre facade of protection is lost upon me becoming a woman. How would I react to that wall being stripped away, and my entire worldview foundationally altering in accordance with the body I exist in?
I can picture it so clearly: now I’m unsure of what to wear to go outside where men will be, knowing I will be perceived by those men I’ll see in front of me, and out of the corner of my eye, and anyone I don’t see from far away, but who can see me all too well. Now I’m going to have to ensure my keys can be gripped in my fist, and I can access them quickly if I need to use them as a weapon. Now I have to be wary of the men walking behind me, and maybe even ahead of me. Now I’m always waiting for the moments I get catcalled, and the pit in my stomach that forms as I hear my personhood reduced to how good I do or don’t look in their eyes. Now I’m feeling this simmering awareness of their eyes on me, wondering if I’m paranoid and it’s nothing, or if I should be afraid and on edge in case they decide to do something. Now I’m wondering if others around me would help if an incident did occur. Now I’m cautious about how much skin I should or shouldn’t show with the clothing options open to me, even though I know damn well that no matter the season, no matter what I wear, no matter how I behave - for my own joy, or for my own protection; being among friends, or keeping to myself - and no matter what I try to do to alleviate the ever-present awareness of my own perpetual unsafety, there is nothing I can do to change the thoughts and impulses of anyone dead set on causing me harm. Now I’m thinking about whether the police would really help me if my life depended on it. Now I’m thinking about how my very existence is constantly politicised and debated and belittled by the odious shitweasels of social media. Now I’m thinking now I’m thinking now I’m thinking now I’m thinking now I’m thinking now I’m thinking now…
That’s how my mind works. I can’t imagine my newly-feminised nervous system being exposed to a world holistically hostile to women’s wellbeing, and me not falling into a thought spiral that suffocates me with all the things I’m supposed to keep living through.
(To add insult to injury, I was midway through writing the above tangent about the differences between men and women’s views of the dangers of putting themselves out there when others’ hearts harbour unknown threats, when I had to stop because my bus to Cardiff had arrived, and I was on my way to see Strange Darling at the cinema on its last night of being shown, after a limited week-long theatrical run. So imagine my surprise when, within the first 20 minutes of the film, Willa Fitzgerald’s character starts talking about this very subject I’d been handwringing over during my writing of this very review! I mean, it’s one thing for a movie to make you feel seen, but it’s entirely another for a movie to make you feel like it was spying over your shoulder without you even knowing…)
Through Revenge, Carolie Fargeat crafts a blood-drenched allegory for the choices women have to make to survive in this world. You should be able to live free from shame and judgement, unafraid to let loose and have fun and be yourself, without being seen as unworthy of respect and dignity because of your gender, your sexuality, or whatever else. But this world often punishes women for living lives that offend the narrow-minded sensibilities of those who see women as superficial disposable commodities. Women know this, and they also know that the only way to stay relatively sane in an insane world, that so often has their worst interests at heart, is to dial down that pain and anger and fear to a quiet simmer, and hope against all odds that on any given day, in any given situation, they’ll be around a majority of regular decent people who won’t bring them to harm. It’s like Thomas Ligotti talks about in The Conspiracy Against The Human Race - in order to keep from falling into the despairing oblivion of hopeless pessimism, we have to essentially delude ourselves willingly into believing that this life is good and worth living, even if we’re never not aware that darkness and chaos and unsafety can befall us at any moment without warning.
And so it goes with being a woman.
Fighting tooth and nail to survive.
Fighting to stick it to those who may victimise them.
Fighting for justice.
Fighting to keep the joys that make life worth living.
Fighting because they’re underestimated and expected not to put up a fight at all.
Fighting because fighting is often the only language men understand or will listen to.
Fighting because, even though the world is not a fine place, it is worth fighting for.
Rating: ★★★★½
(Clarifying here for the record that I’m not necessarily coming at this from a trans angle, as I don’t identify as such, nor do I have the lived experience of someone who is a woman, be they cis or trans or any other such delineations our stupid culture argues too much over; but I’m also not not coming at it from that perspective, because maybe what I’m about to talk about could resonate with the feelings others have felt in actually going from one gender identity to another, non-binary people included.)