JUMPCUT RAPE REVENGE MOVIE
JUMPCUT RAPE REVENGE TV

At one point there’s so much blood that the characters literally can’t remain standing on a slippery floor. Revenge is thoroughly graphic in every possible way. Even if you don’t believe that at the moment, you will before the film is through. He may not have done it, but it’s as if Revenge is saying, he’s just as guilty.

JUMPCUT RAPE REVENGE TV

His choice to remove himself from the situation and turn up the TV so he doesn’t have to hear her screams is slowed down and made gruesome, for maximum effect. One bystander has the opportunity to intervene. To its extreme credit, Revenge does not in any way excuse or redeem the men. When Jen first gets out of the helicopter, the camera gives her elevator eyes and then so do two men, showing the distinct difference between the film objectifying Jen and characters within the film doing the same. The shower sex scenes, specifically, differ greatly from the way Jen’s body is filmed in this movie. This is Revenge’s POV: Jen is always shown as naked and as sexy as possible, and Richard is shown as modestly and neutrally as possible.įor my money, an effective reclaiming of the grindhouse aesthetic and rape revenge tropes is Bitch Planet. In another nude shot, the camera deliberately avoids showing him below the waist almost the entire time. We eventually see Richard do the trademarked sexy bloody crawl that Jen does earlier, but his positioning affords him maximum modesty. Being pantsless is certainly a liberating feeling that resonates with many women, but this is clearly the kind of pantslessness that exists for a male audience. She’s the star, but she’s just another headless woman, even when she’s alone. There are several tracking shots early on in the house where the only part of her body that was see is from midriff to upper thigh. Jen’s nudity, on the other hand, is inescapable. When we do see a man fully naked, he’s filmed neutrally he could just as easily be wearing one of his leather jackets. While there’s some male nudity, it’s less frequent and less studied than Jen’s. For a master class in the straight female gaze, see Outlander. Further, there is no female gaze in this film, except perhaps in the way Richard’s cheekbones are lovingly filmed, but we all know the female gaze would care more about his arms, shoulders and back, and would have a stronger point-of-view when it deigns to show his butt.

Not sexualizing rape seems an awful lot like the bare fucking minimum, rather than something worth applauding. It’s been described as “aggressively feminist” and praised for not showing rape for pleasure. The basis of praise for this film, beyond being a formidable entry into the grindhouse/exploitation/rape revenge canon, is that it turns those tropes on their head, empowering the heroine and removing the male gaze or even using the (straight) female gaze. But does it have to be? And at what point does critiquing the thing merely become recreating it, participating in it, benefiting from it while still getting to claim the moral high ground? The male gaze is obviously a pivotal trope to grindhouse movies, and rape revenge in particular. Why must a woman be literally impervious to death in order to be a great character? This movie, like so many others, takes the “strong” in “strong female character” literally, and deprives Jen of any female companionship (or companionship at all!) to boot. A woman writer-director certainly helps, but that’s a superficial measure of empowerment.

JUMPCUT RAPE REVENGE MOVIE

Is such a thing as a feminist rape revenge movie even possible? The marketing push around this movie, proudly quoting male trolls who sound like Richard, posits that Revenge is just that. Richard kills her, and the men spend the next few days being hunted down by the barefoot, scantily clad, and inexplicably revived Jen. Richard tries to buy Jen off with a check and a promise of a job in Canada (“it’s practically LA”), but when she insists on going home instead, Richard gets violent and Jen flees. Sparsely populated and with even sparser dialogue, this moody film takes a turn for the worst when Stan rapes Jen while Richard is in town. Married jerk Richard (Kevin Janssens) brings his mistress, Jen (Matilda Lutz), to his hunting getaway when they are joined by his married buddies, Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchede) for what appears to be an annual guys’ trip. Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat and filmed in Morocco, Revenge is an exercise in brutality.

Jumpcut rape revenge