Revenge (2018)

Oh, dear. Why is it whenever a director wants to make a controversial, boundary challenging and confronting film, they cleave to precisely the same format? 

Take a beautiful woman. Deposit her in an isolated location. Surround her by deviant, thirsty men. Have them rape her. Have her survive and exact bloody revenge.

I call shotgun!

This was the formula used back in 1978 for I Spit On Your Grave and (with slight alterations in the plot, allowing others to avenge the violation) Wes Craven's Last House on the Left (1972) and its original source, The Virgin Spring (1960) by Bergman; and probably further and further back. Sex and cinema have gone hand in hand since the first moving images were captured, and there is inevitably a point where the male gaze becomes the male touch.

But those films were, in their way, transgressive and had purpose - at least sufficient justification to sustain a beery argument. Even I Spit On Your Grave, in spite of its flaws (and there are many, oh, so many) could claim it was bein genuinely transgressive and confronting its audience with something that had to be confronted. Director Meir Zarchi's account of the genesis of the film (helping a young woman raped in New York, and witnessing the judgmental attitude of the police) revealed an intention - perhaps unforgivably botched - of telling us something about sexual violence.  The furore that surrounded the film - the persistent bans and enforced cuts - exposed the unwillingness of mainstream society to heed that message. Whether or not it had much moral or artistic value of its own, it served a wider, 'meta' purpose and there was a point to its existence.

Not so Revenge, a bloody updating of the narrative with a video game sensibility and several gallons of fake blood.

Writer-director Coralie Fargeat sticks close to the template of I Spit On Your Grave. The only significant differences are retrograde tweaks - Jen (played by Matilda Lutz with a painfully limited range of expression) is signally more attractive than Grave's Camille Keaton (also, of course a Jen, in case we were unsure about how much Fargeat was being influenced by the earlier film) and she is dumped in the middle of a desert via a helicopter chartered by her exceedingly rich and married boyfriend Richard.

(Am I reading too much into it that his name can be shortened to 'dick', reducing him and by implication all male characters to their sexual organs. And perhaps Jen' can be homophoned to 'Gen' as in 'generative' as in 'organs' ... Or maybe I'm reading too much into this.)

After briefly providing Dick with oral pleasure, just to confirm her status a sexual plaything, Jen is startled when two of his friends show up - greasy, gross Stan and Dimitri, interrupting their romantic weekend. They are there to go hunting with Dick, to enjoy a few days of killing beautiful animals - though it turns out they are not very good at it, and the beautiful animal will turn all of the tables on all of their heads.

Dick isn't much into partying, which frustrates Jen. So she flirts with Stan, via the medium of interpretive dance, which he interprets as her wanting to have sex with him, so he rapes her the next day while Dick is off doing stuff.

Jen doesn't take well to Dick's attempt to buy her silence (and his quick resort to physical violence) and she runs off into the desert. The men pursue her, and Dick pushes her off a cliff, leaving her impaled and presumed dead. But when the men reach the bottom of the cliff, tough Jen has managed to free herself (though with a large branch stick sticking phallically from her abdomen) and scurry off into the desert. Then men set off in pursuit, and then the hunter becomes the hunted and blah blah blah.

So it is, as I said, virtually a rehash of I Spit On Your Grave, but with less sex (unlike the luckless Jennifer, Revenge's Jen is 'only' raped once, and thankfully we are spared an Irreversible style explicit rape scene) and a far more lurid, flashy, noisy production design.

In terms of the story, then, it is nothing new and - in spite of its desperate 'Look at me being controversial' antics, it isn't controversial.  Grisly rape-revenge yarns have been a feature of the horror genre for many years, and Revenge does nothing to expand, critique or subvert these conventions.

Underneath the surface frisson of controversy lie issues that need to be considered.

By casting the alluring Matilda Lutz as Jen, the film perpetuates the same uncomfortable idea of Irreversible and other films - that rape is only worth our attention when it happens to beautiful people.  Most of us do not look like Matilda Lutz or Monica Bellucci.  Probably, most of us don't look like Camille Keaton from I Spit On Your grave, though she was not presented in that film as a stunningly beautiful woman.  Given most rapes happen to perfectly normal, average looking women, why is it so often the superbly lovely that are featured in films that dealing with the topic?

The answer is, of course, depressingly obvious - rape-revenge films, even ones written and directed by women and described as 'feminist revenge fantasies' are still providing a very male gaze experience, as evidenced her by the early scenes of Lutz lounging invitingly on a bed, wandering about in revealing clothes, dancing and languidly pulling her undies on after a refreshing shower.  Nor are we buying any justification that this is how the predatory males around her are viewing her, and if we're titillated by it we're no different from them ... blah blah blah.  We know fan service when we see it.

All this - and more - in the first 20 minutes

You might think that Jen's subsequent ordeal might be the antithesis of sexy - she's impaled on a tree, leaving an open wound that oozes blood and vital organs, until she solders herself up with a bit of bad ass home medical aid.   And Jen's switcheroo is accompanied by numerous shots objectifying her Amazonian posturing as shamelessly as the earlier sequences where she had as much agency as a Westworld Hosts.

"Work it, darling, give me an intense smoulder.  Oh, baby, you killed it!"

We're supposed to simultaneous view her as a victim of sexual aggression while the film continues to eroticize her.  If a male director presented his female protagonist in this way it would be called cheap, nasty and exploitative.  Just having a female director doesn't change that.

This is a serious film with a lot to say about ... oh, get that arse!

Turning into Lara Croft isn't exactly a massive step up the representational ladder, and that seems an apt comparison.  The whole second, vengeance orientated half of the film feels like a computer game, as Jen's massive injuries are forgotten as quickly as Lara's after she pops a medical kit, and she is thereafter able to run, shoot and fight as capably as her uninjured, bush seasoned stalkers.  I guess in the sad world of film promotion, this cartoonish nonsense counts as feminism.

The implication that Jen has - by killing her abusers - somehow won and assuaged the horror of the rape, and subsequent attempt to kill her.  This is a curious suggestion.  I'm pretty sure that bloody vengeance doesn't actually make that go away and a serious film about rape would be focused on the trauma Jen has to live with and how - if - she comes to terms with it.  By ending the film with Jen victorious, the film is saying, sotto voce, that none of it mattered.  trauma is resolved with bullets.  It's not a serious film, not worth any more consideration than the corniest cheap, played for laughs slasher.

In fairness, the film makers don't just fixate on Jen's bum.  They seem to quite like Dick's, as well.

Not only that.  Though the film is called Revenge, Jen isn't actually given the choice of seeking revenge - what she does is survival, as she remains almost entirely quarry, a target.  Once she drags herself off the tree, she staggers off into the badlands, and the men set off after her.  If they had not come after her, she would likely have quickly died.  The pursuit forces her to fight, gives her the resources she needs to deal with her injuries, and opportunities to strike back.  If she had started actively pursuing the men as Jennifer does in I Spit on You Grave, claiming the is a rape-revenge film might have been justified.  Jen might be brave, resourceful and very tough but she doesn't have agency.  She's reactive.  Revenge in Revenge looks more like running away and just fighting to stay alive.

A better film would have been to have Jen stagger off, escape the pursuers and then - weeks or months later - come after them.  Perhaps targeting them once they return to the safety of their domestic lives, perhaps waiting until they return to the hunting ground.  Perhaps she targets those around them, the innocent and unsuspecting, because the horror she went through has made her into something monstrous.  That would be a film with some sort of moral purpose and at least suit the title.  It would be a lot more thought provoking than what we get which is basically, "Rape is bad!  Killing rapists is fun!"

I suppose it could be argued that Revenge is as relevant now as I Spit on Your Grave was in the 70s.  Do I delude myself that structural misogyny is no longer a thing?  Did I sleep through #MeToo?  Have I not heard of Andrew Tate?  But while you could make that argument for the basic subject - men regarding women as objects to be enjoyed and destroyed - you can't make a credible justification for Revenge making the same crass blunders as I Spit on Your Grave did, and amplifying them.

Star Rating: *