Sun-Drenched Revenge: Coralie Fargeat's Undaunted Debut

In this ruthlessly original rape-revenge film, Jen is on a weekend getaway in a remote desert resort with her married lover, Richard, and his two friends, Stan and Dimitri. After Stan rapes her, she’s horrified to find that Richard’s only concern is keeping her silent about the horrific incident. He tries to kill her by pushing her off of a cliff, but she miraculously survives, seemingly “resurrected” as she hunts each of them down, literally, in a blood-soaked pursuit of vigilante justice.

As Max Weinstein wrote in MovieMaker Magazine, “If you’d have told film critics five years ago (or maybe even just last year) that a rape-and-revenge film released in 2018 would be lauded as a feminist triumph, many probably would’ve told you that was wishful thinking.”[1] But Fargeat’s film avoids the debasement that usually characterizes this exploitation subgenre, instead conceiving a film focused much more on the transformational revenge phase of its character’s trajectory. There is an almost mythological, excruciatingly-risen-from-the-ashes quality to Jen’s metamorphosis from a bubble-gum popping Bardot into an armored weapon-wielding desert tracker. In her interview with MovieMaker, Fargeat named Kill Bill, Mad Max, and Rambo as inspirations for her film, particularly Mad Max’s “phantasmagoric” desert landscape.

Revenge’s cinematography is as drenched in color as it is in blood. The intense blues, pinks, and oranges of the opening shots are meant, Fargeat says, to evoke an “intoxicating” desert paradise that degenerates into a sunbathed nightmare, as “the sensuality of bodies” rots into something “crude, sweaty, violent, and nauseating.”[2] The morning after their desert disco party, as Stan pins Jen up against the large glass windows, Dmitri shoves a large handful of sticky candy into his mouth, the camera cutting to a close-up of his teeth mashing away in what is undoubtedly one of the most sickening shots of the film. Fargeat’s film shines a glaring light on the bros club of rape culture, as Dimitri leaves Stan with Jen and turns on the television in the adjoining room to cover up the sounds of her screams. Revenge was shot at an isolated villa in the Moroccan desert, enhancing the terrifying feeling of Jen’s isolation, before subsequently turning the tables on the perpetrators so that they become the paranoid prey in a giant hunting ground.

Quite vividly, Fargeat compared women’s navigation of danger and violence to “swimming with sharks,” emphasizing that the film’s excessive carnage and gunfire is not about literal killing but about “breaking the code of silence.”[3] Likening Fargeat’s aesthetic to that of the New French Extremity – a movement both hailed and decried for its transgressive corporeality and visceral treatment of sex and violence – Katie Rife asserts that Revenge remains “faithful to the grindhouse spirit while subverting it with an unapologetically female gaze.”[4]

[1] Weinstein, Max. “Desert Eagle: How Coralie Fargeat Shot Revenge in the Moroccan Desert, Preserved her Creative Freedom, and More,” MovieMaker Magazine, May 15, 2018. [2] Lemercier, Fabien. “Interview with Coralie Fargeat,” Cineuropa, June 2, 2018. [3] Ibid. [4] Rife, Katie, “The Rape-Revenge Film is Reborn in Fire and Blood in the Outrageous, Visceral Revenge,” AV Film, May 9, 2018.