The woman-avenger on the post-Soviet screen

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe article focuses on the figure of the female avenger in Viktor Sergeev's The Executioner (1990) and its eponymous remake by Sergei Beloshnikov (2006). If earlier the Soviet woman was hell-bent on revenge in response to assaults against her country and ideology, by the early 1990s she seemed to be empowered to reclaim her body as her own property rather than an incarnation of the country. However, while at first allowing their narratives to unfold as rape-revenge films, the film-makers redirect the heroine's thirst for revenge towards social ills, detach her actions as a deadly woman from the fact that she was raped by her compatriots, and impose on her the comforting role of saviour. In doing so, they deviate from the rape-revenge paradigm established by such American films as Lipstick (Lamont Johnson, 1976), I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1977) and Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981) and obliquely interpret the sexual assault against the protagonist as a lesser offence than the mafia's violations. Although discredited by Russian film-makers as a pattern unworthy of adoption, the rape-revenge paradigm is a crucial backdrop for exploring cinema's reliance on inveterate cultural postulates and fears of rapidly changing morals.