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Coralie Fargeat (France, 1976) debuted with shorts such as
the dystopian sci-fi movie Reality+ (2014).
Revenge (2017) is an amoral thriller with only four characters,
all of them amoral. It is a film about superhuman beings because they all
still stand and even run after being horribly wounded, mutilated and having
lost a lot of blood. The plot is generally implausible but the visual story
is much more compelling than the narrative one. For what it's worth,
the "revenge" is not so much a revenge as a fight for survival.
A helicopter lands in the desert, dropping a man and his sexy young girlfriend.
They walk into a house with a swimming pool, the only visible structure.
They make love right away and then the man, Richard, calls his wife.
While the girl is walking around scantily dressed, two men armed like soldiers
arrive. They are partners of Richard in an undefined shady business. The trio
has organized a fake hunting trip for whatever purpose. The girl, Jennifer,
is there only for a couple of nights to be used by Richard, and it is not said
whether she's an extramarital affair or a prostitute. In the evening they
party and take drugs. One of the two new arrivals, Stan, is clearly seduced
by the young woman. She tells him that her next stop is Los Angeles, where
she plans to become a celebrity. Richard shows them a very powerful drug
and Jennifer steals some.
In the morning Richard leaves Jennifer who has to pack because the helicopter
is coming to pick her up, but Stan flirts with her and eventually rapes her.
The other man, Dimitry, sees it but walks out indifferent, and, when Jennifer's
screams are too loud, he simply turns on the TV set. When Richard returns and
finds a traumatized Jennifer, he tries to calm her down offering her money
and a job in Canada. She demands to leave immediately and, when Richard
finds excuses, she runs away, chased by the three men all the way to a cliff.
Richard begs her to stop and promises to call the helicopter for her.
Then suddenly he pushes her down the cliff. She falls vertically until her
body is pierced by a sharp tree, which stops her fall. A branch cuts through
her belly and sticks out. She looks dead and Richard tells the other two that
they should still enjoy their hunting weekend. Jennifer wakes up. She is not
dead. She manages to grab her lighter and set fire to the tree, which releases
her body. She then drags herself under a rock. When the men return and look
down from the cliff, they cannot see her. By the time they descend the cliff,
she has run away. They follow the trail of blood on the beach but at some
point the blood stops because she has started walking in the water. The three
men split: Richard proceeds in one direction on a motorcycle, Dimitry in
the opposite direction on an ATV, and Stan remains in the car.
Dimitry stops to pee and Jennifer steals his gun, but the gun is not loaded
and he grabs her. He calls the others that he find her, and then punishes her
by pushing her head repeatedly underwater. She grabs his knife and sticks it
into one of his eyes, killing him. She then takes his knife and his gun with
ammunitions. She finds a cave and makes a fire. She has lost a lot of blood,
she is barefoot and wears only a bikini,
and she still has the piece of wood in her belly. She takes the powerful
drug and cuts her belly with the knife to extract the wood, and then melts
a beer can to use it to stop the bleeding. In the morning Richard and Stan
realize that Dimitry is missing. Stan finds his body in the water and
has a panic attack. Richard smacks him breaking his nose. Meanwhile, Jennifer
wakes up after a series of nightmares and finds a bird tattooed on her belly
because it was carved on the can that she used to stop her bleeding.
She walks out (always barefoot and scantily dresses) and scans the desert with
binoculars. She sees Stan's car approaching. She follows the car up a hill.
When the car runs out of gasoline, Stan has to stop and grab a tank from the
trunk. She shoots him but only wounds him. She chases him (always barefoot).
He is bleeding and this time it's her who follows the trail of blood.
He outsmarts her and shoots her but, being unstable on his feet after she
dropped some glass on the road that made a bit cut in one of his feet,
he misses and only severes one of her ears. He runs back to the car and drives
after her at high speed trying to run her over but she calmly aims and this
time she kills him. Then she takes the car.
Meanwhile, Richard rode the motorcycle back to his villa and calls the
helicopter. While he showers, he hears a noise. He searchs the villa and
doesn't see anything wrong, but suddenly she appears in front of him,
a bikini girl armed with a big gun. She shoots him but fails to kill him.
Thus begins a bloody shootout inside the rooms of the villa.
She can barely hear what he is shouting because she lost one ear.
He loses
so much blood that eventually she slips on blood and loses her gun.
Luckily, he has run out of bullets. She manages to regain her gun and
to kill him. Then she calmly walks outside while the helicopter is
approaching.
(Copyright © 2019 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
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