‘Revenge’ director Coralie Fargeat on her gory riposte to the male gaze

Coralie Fargeat is at an enviable point in her career. “The Hollywood doors are opening for me now,” the French film director and writer says between sips of coffee, fresh off the red-eye from Los Angeles to London. After two excellent short films, her first feature is about to be released, having already played well at festivals and led to representation by the behemoth talent agency William Morris Entertainment. “I’ve had offers and scripts from many people who want to make a movie with me,” she says, taking it in her stride.

Fargeat chose to demonstrate her directorial prowess with an unusual choice of genre — what’s known in the trade as a rape-and-revenge film. Possibly the first ever made by a woman, it is an awesome sensory spectacle, gory, gripping and unsettlingly satisfying. The gallons of claret spilled as the protagonist Jen takes revenge on the men who left her for dead were influenced in part by South Korean films such as Old Boy and I Saw the Devil, in which, Fargeat says, “the bloody scenes are so excessive that they become absurd and poetic. I’m interested in when blood and flesh create something that becomes baroque and operatic. [Quentin] Tarantino does that in Kill Bill.” She is also a fan of David Cronenberg’s “body horror” films. “All these intentions,” she says, “I wanted to put together and use in a different way, and make a genre film my way.”

The opening scenes of Revenge are excruciating. Jen, a naive, insecure young woman, is at a secluded desert house with her wealthy, married boyfriend and two of his friends who have shown up early for a hunting trip. After dinner, the men mock her attempts to talk about her own life, and she seeks approval instead by dancing with them. Fargeat’s direction exaggerates their entitled male gaze lingering over her body — a gaze, seen across the media, which primes girls to win attention, Fargeat says, “with their bodies and sensuality. I wanted to embrace the fascinating, polarising image of the Lolita. Jen can be empty and stupid and an object of desire if she wants. It shouldn’t lead to what’s going to happen next.”

The rape, which happens while Jen’s lover is out of the house, isn’t lingered over. “For me that’s not what the film’s about,” says Fargeat. “So I didn’t feel the need to make it visually important. Before she is raped, she’s told it’s her fault, that she created the situation. I wanted to deal with the psychological and verbal violence towards her — the rape is symbolic of the way she’s considered and treated.”

Fargeat’s intention was to make a revenge film like Mad Max or Rambo, “with strong characters on a phantasmagoric journey”. She hasn’t felt inclined to watch the rape-and-revenge exploitation movies that were rife in the 1970s and 80s. “I wasn’t really interested in that genre. The only one I watched was [Wes Craven’s 1972 directorial debut] Last House on the Left. I wanted to take this story out of the genre of horror. I didn’t want Jen to be screaming and suffering for the whole movie, trying to survive. I wanted her to go somewhere else and transform into a cool and badass character.”

I wanted the desert to be a character in itself, mirroring what’s going on with the people

When the men see that Jen isn’t prepared to keep quiet about the crime, she is left for dead in the desert — though when they return to the spot, they find she is gone. She finds a cave in which to do some fantastical makeshift surgery on herself, before rising like a phoenix to begin her quest.

Revenge was filmed in Morocco, but the idea is that it could be anywhere. “I wanted the desert to be a character in itself, mirroring what’s going on with the people,” Fargeat says. “As the hunt intensifies, they get more and more out of control, mad and violent, while the desert gets hotter, connecting them with the violent elements of nature.”

There’s only about 14 minutes of dialogue and it’s almost all at the beginning. The atmosphere is built visually and with music, sound effects and pacing. “I like having very few elements I can play with,” says Fargeat, citing Duel (1971) by Steven Spielberg as an influence. “I was amazed by how it manages to keep the tension for that long with so few elements: a car, a truck and that’s it.”

Her first short film, The Telegram (2003), is a perfect example of how to, as she says, “create tension that grows little by little”. As two mothers in a wartime French village watch the man who delivers killed-in-action telegrams limp towards their houses, each crunch of his foot on the gravel is more painful than the last.

“As a film-maker,” says Fargeat, “I know in terms of action we’ve almost seen it all. When you don’t have a huge budget you have to think what really matters in a scene to make it powerful and innovative.” In Revenge’s showdown with the boyfriend, he is naked. “That’s something you’re not used to seeing in this kind of scene: him naked, the blood and this corridor; putting those elements together the right way creates images that stay with you.”

A few months after the film was finished, the #MeToo movement came to prominence. “Those moments where art or film are meeting what happens in the world are rare,” Fargeat says. Most of all she hopes that #MeToo can instigate a permanent cultural shift, and was shocked that French actresses such as Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve spoke out against it. “In France, the women don’t feel at ease enough to talk yet. It depends on when you feel society is going to support you.”

When Fargeat has finished this round of press interviews, she will return to her hometown of Paris to write her next film. She is open to the Hollywood offers but cautious too. “Choices can seem very sparkly and easy to jump on, but a film is two to three years of your life, so I’m meeting a lot of people and reading scripts while taking my time to get to know the industry over there.”

Whatever idea she lands on, she says, “there will still be some way to push boundaries, step outside of reality and deal with people going out of control. These are the elements I need to be really thrilled by a project.”

‘Revenge’ is released on May 11

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