In Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, patience is a virtue of both storytelling and of vengeance. The film may have places to be, people to meet and blood to spill, but Fargeat takes her time all the same. She can afford the build up, in no small part because the build up is as pleasing as the payoff.
“Pleasing” may seem at best an ignorant qualifier for a rape-revenge movie, but denying the pleasure of Revenge’s deliberate, exquisite filmmaking would mean denying Fargeat’s strength of vision, of that rare rape-revenge movie directed by a woman rather than a man. The innate ugliness of Revenge is crystallized by the shift in perspective. Not to knock I Spit on Your Grave, I Saw the Devil or The Virgin Spring, but seeing this particular niche through the eyes of Fargeat and her star, Matilda Lutz, gives the material a unique resonance without abandoning the genre’s underpinnings.
Lutz plays Jen, an American socialite on a romantic getaway with Richard (Belgian actor Kevin Janssens), her gorgeous, ridiculously wealthy French boyfriend, two-timing his wife together in his luxurious modern desert pad. Joining them are Richard’s bros, Stanley (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitry (Guillaume Bouchède), who show up early for a planned boys’ hunting trip. Their arrival leads to cascading transgressions. Jen wields her sexuality with neither shame nor apology. Why should she be sorry for dressing to highlight her body or for having harmless flirty fun?
The dynamic shared between Jen and Revenge’s male coterie is built on entitlement. Stanley is a remora affixed to Richard’s manly surface, inadequate in the shadow of their friendship. Having basked in Jen’s platonic notices for an evening, he decides that she wants him. When she makes it clear that she doesn’t, he takes her anyway. In the parlance of rape apologists, she was asking for it. Post-rape, Richard first plays her knight in shining armor, then tries to buy her silence and ship her to Canada, because how else would an alpha male of seemingly infinite means handle a problem other than by throwing money at it? “It’s practically Los Angeles,” he tells her, recalling her dream of moving to the City of Angels. He presents this olive branch with a smile on his lips and in his eyes, genuinely convinced of the magnanimity of his gesture.