But one of the most impressive feats of all is the way Fargeat subverts and co-opts the male gaze, turning it into something that’s both playful and fierce. The sexy and scantily clad Matilda Lutz initially looks like an irresistible piece of eye candy, and Fargeat knows you’re thinking that. She toys with your expectations of how a woman who looks like Lutz is normally photographed in a film like this before ultimately celebrating her character for the warrior she becomes.
From this review of “Revenge” by Coralie Fargeat.
A woman, Jen, is raped by one of her boyfriend’s hunting buddies while another buddy watches indifferently. The boyfriend– who is cheating on his wife with Jen– returns and doesn’t seem very disturbed about it. When she demands justice, she is chased to a cliff by the three men and pushed over so that she is impaled on a tree. Remarkably, she recovers, and returns to the scene to take brutal revenge.
This reviewer, and others, celebrate this fresh, exciting story because, after all, she was raped: the men deserve to die, and the action sequences are pretty cool.
Maybe they do deserve to die. That’s for another day, and another philosophical discussion. Maybe the scenario is contrived to allow you to feel good about watching these men suffer and die. (That is absolutely true.) And maybe the transformation of Jen from an air-head exhibitionist potential valley-girl into an action hero capable of astounding acts of athleticism is a puerile fantasy.
It doesn’t matter: the critics fall over themselves to sing the praises of Fargeat. Why? Is it because action films that feature male protagonists chasing and murdering males is such marvelous entertainment that a simple role reversal only spikes the tension? Or is it because those films have become boring and the role reversal makes it interesting again?