Gore girl
REVENGE I Coralie Fargeat turns the rape-revenge movie on its head with her kick-ass, blood-drenched, female-first debut…
When Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, the world was a different place: no #TimesUp, no #MeToo, and Harvey Weinstein was still making movies. In 2018, Fargeat’s film has a whole new impact, as the young mistress (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) of a businessman (Kevin Janssens) takes on the men who raped her and left her for dead.
Shot with a gorgeous pop-art palette in the high heat of the Marrakesh desert, Revenge follows hard on the heels of Julia Ducournau’s Raw as a thrilling example of the new Eurohorror – just as Fargeat intended. “I always wanted to do a genre film because I’m a huge fan of those movies,” she explains. “They built my cinephilia. I love films that take you somewhere else and out of mere reality.”
Inspired by films as far apart as Kill Bill and Tomb Raider and determined to fill the gap in the middle, Fargeat decided to take the kind of woman who would usually be the victim in a genre film and make her the heroine.
“I was interested in the idea of the Lolita girl,” she says. “Someone who would be initially seen as very weak and empty, but who would transform into a very powerful and strong character. But, after that, the body comes to be harmed and distressed.”
Which is putting it mildly. By the end, the screen is awash with blood, though Fargeat laughingly protests, “There’s not that much!” Have audiences been surprised to find that Revenge was made by a woman? “Well, there are still a lot of clichés,” she muses. “So, yes, people are surprised. But in my childhood, my grandfather showed me the Rambo movies, The Fly, RoboCop, and I thought they were cool. I was very much more attracted by this universe than the dull girly stuff.”
ETA | 11 may / revenge opens next month.