Revanche might have been a perfectly good thriller if Austrian filmmaker Gotz Spielmann had been content to leave out his transcendental musings on the nature of guilt, but it is this that probably got the film its nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.
The film starts out strong, producing a very downbeat and gritty picture of a brothel staffed by Eastern European prostitutes and serviced by various lowlife types. Among these is Alex, a wannabe tough guy who has fallen for hooker Tamara and wants to get her away from the life they live of furtive meetings between tricks.
This life is certainly not glamorized, but Spielmann, for all his hard-edged realism wants to cater to our voyeuristic streak, which he does with a singular lack of flair. Tamara (Irina Potapenko) is shown in a kind of anti-erotic nakedness that is pretending not to be the titillation it really is.
Aside from the flagrant use of sexual images to appeal to his audience, something that Spielmann also used in his previous feature film Antares (2004), the two central roles of Tamara and Alex (Johannes Krisch) are strongly realized. There is something touchingly pathetic about Alex’s insistence that “he has a plan,” which almost from the beginning we all know will go wrong. “It is only stupid people without a plan who get caught,” he insists. He doesn’t get caught. Things actually pan out much worse than that.
The first half of the film deals with Alex and his dreams to run away with Tamara. After his bank job goes awry and Tamara is killed by a stray bullet, he finds refuge with his aging father in a rural town, were his dreams of life with his dearly departed lover become dreams of revenge for her death.
Unfortunately, both for Alex and Revanche, he still doesn’t have much of a plan, and Spielmann substitutes a laboriously constructed morality tale instead of pushing ahead with the revenge story.
Alex becomes involved in a physical relationship with Susanne, a wife who has lost touch with her policeman husband. Here again, the role is finely realized by Ursula Strauss, but ultimately wasted as simply one more building block in Spielmann’s increasingly complex structure of coincidences designed to play off the question, “Whose fault is it if life doesn’t go your way?” which was used as the tag line for the film’s US release.
There is never any doubt that Spielmann will pull the story together, for it is clear that he is a talented craftsman and the film wraps up nice and neat — and eminently forgettable. The workmanship shows cleverness, but it is a self-satisfied cleverness that leaves the audience on the outside looking in.
Revanche is saved by its outstanding cast members who work hard to give the characters an emotional depth. It is the acting that makes even the slow second half of the film worth watching. But the end is a long time coming and nobody seems to get anything as satisfying as revenge.
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