Coralie Fargeat
Revenge

It's not easy when a film universally applauded makes you feel sick. You wonder if you're the one at fault, if you didn't understand it, if you focused on one detail and forgot how beautiful everything else is. It's likely that something similar happened between me and Revenge, I don't doubt it. I got hung up on some passages I found unacceptable and spent the rest of the time sighing and looking for flaws. I repeated to friends four or five times: "It's not realistic." And that's serious because I am the same person who welcomed all the scientific inconsistencies of Gravity with open arms, who loved Interstellar despite certain very imaginative scenes. I don't care about the scientific accuracy of a film: as long as I am given some rules, no matter how absurd, I just need the sequences to be consistent with that given system.

Revenge is set in the real world, but physics, medicine, logic, and probability follow all new dynamics, simply aimed at making the revenge of the sexy girl in the poster triumph. One who appears on screen sashaying in a swimsuit (and the director isn't afraid to linger too long on that beautiful little butt) with loud music in a dream house in the desert. Shortly after, we learn she's the fling of a man who loves hunting with two sketchy buddies. From there, the degeneration starts, transforming the doll, just like that, from day to night, into a ruthless and unstoppable killer, a woman capable of anything.

A poor man's Kill Bill in a #metoo version, without any psychological depth of the protagonists. The girl is purely a victim, the killings she perpetuates aren't subject to moral judgment. The men are scoundrels always ready to lower their flies, cunning traitors, horrid pigs who argue among themselves instead of teaming up against the huntress. Obviously, comparing it to Tarantino's masterpiece is a cruel operation, but inevitable given the similarity of the events. All the premises, all the frills, all the portraiture richness useful to make Beatrix's revenge more poignant are omitted here so that our protagonist can kill without problems guys who seem like caricatures.

But the operation is not simply the result of incompetence; it is deliberate. As in many other cases, it's yet another work that wants to ride the wave of feminism, and it does so in the worst way. For instance, our Jennifer, after going through all sorts of things, wakes up wounded and almost bloodless, but then she puts on the cartridge belt and a couple of rifles, goes out onto the plateau, and we notice that she's still a photogenic beauty, so much so that the directing naively lingers on every curve of her magnificent body, exalted by fashionable shorts and tank top. The mud on her hair acts like a dye, the scorching can for cauterizing a gash has left her with a jaw-dropping tattoo. No need to recall Beatrix Kiddo in a yellow suit or the one emerging from Paula Shultz's grave, all covered in dirt. Again, it's a cruel and merciless exercise.

There's a little bit of good, but very little. The 80s synth-pop music and the amount of blood that flows uncensored, even in the grotesque sequencing of many scenes. The grotesque works if it has a meaning, if it wants to condemn someone or something with a mocking and subtle laugh. Here, there's really little that's subtle, and so it just gives the impression of wanting to ridicule the bad guys of the moment, further highlighting the angelic heroine. Is all of this a mockery of the dominant macho culture in cinema? Could be, but it lacks the refined touch to emerge as a parody film. And I love parody films. Or anyway, it targets a type of film that is completely outdated, which today wouldn't succeed among the male audience. Much better then the audacious proposals of Red Sparrow and Atomic Blonde, those are a big middle finger to men.