The Hollywood Theatre in Portland went dark. And the film began. There were no public service announcements. No trailers. Just the random sounds of nature somewhere tranquil and seemingly isolated as a lens focused on a tall grove of trees reflected in water. Then an object smacked through the surface, submerging instantly, and the ripples undulated until the water was calm again.
After this ambivalent but evocative opening, the Austrian film “Revanche” suddenly is immersed in the hardcore, urban plight of a hardscrabble Viennese couple. With purposely very little known about the specifics of the plot going in, it is a jarring juxtaposition as the movie becomes engrossed for some time in the grotty and grim story of an ex-con and his prostitute girlfriend. (What did the opening sequence portend?) But patience is required, and rewarded, for a film which eventually returns to the rural setting so that the city and the country form a concentric circle for themes of discontent, anguish and retribution. Revanche translates as revenge. And the first inclination is to suspect that a story steeped in subterranean Vienna will just be a classic story of noirish comeuppance and unintended consequences. But the film Götz Spielmann creates is more complex; it is noir but as if imagined in the pages of Walden. “Revanche” is a deliberate, thorough (and Thoreau) tale which channels the words of the venerated transcendentalist.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Desperation hounds Alex and Tamara. Alex (Johannes Krisch) is the Austrian ex-con toiling as a put-upon dogsbody in a Vienna brothel named “Cinderella.” Tamara (a suitably undemonstrative Irina Potapenko) is the Ukrainian prostitute pressured by the brothel’s owner to work as a more upscale whore, but who fears she’ll be even more controlled by this pimp. Alex is resourceful, aware and kind; his boss calls him soft. With his widow’s peak hair slicked casually back and a prominent moustache, Krisch has the solid sensual presence of Viggo Mortensen and the haunted countenance of Willem Dafoe. As Tamara, Potapenko fixes upon her face the unfazed mask of a sex worker; her gaze is always distant, as though she’s searching out a new, less tormented life with her melancholy eyes. Both in debt, the couple decides to bolt for Ibiza after Alex plans to pilfer a large sum of money in one last score.
In the brothel, the camera of cinematographer Martin Gschlacht can be as dispassionate as closed-circuit television. It watches from a hallway peering into a bedroom, or sits at the edge of a changing room as vacant women slip into lingerie without a word passed between them. Sometimes characters walk off screen while the camera holds its position, just long enough to evoke a jittery mood. (Color and mirrors are used judiciously.) It’s all quite tense while feeling legitimate and fittingly tawdry, dangerous and unsettling.
When a bank robbery is botched, Alex escapes to the countryside outside Vienna and calls upon his grandfather (Johannes Thanheiser), an infirmed but defiant farmer, who lives alone on a working farm. Desiring isolation, Alex chops wood in anticipation of the winter and becomes, reluctantly, a dutiful grandson. The repetitious physical labor affords the mournful Alex a massive amount of time for contemplation. The grandfather’s closest neighbors are a married couple, Robert (Andreas Lust), a Vienna police officer, and Susanne (Ursula Strauss), a shopkeeper who visits the elderly man often. It is a bucolic setting, filmed pleasantly, where winter apples are ripening and his grandfather picks up a dusty, long-forgotten accordion to play for Susanne. But the couple is struggling to conceive and Robert is weighed down with guilt from work. And with every drag on his cigarette, Alex’s face becomes more wounded and hardened, the light extinguished from his eyes, except for the thought of vengeance. Even intercourse isn’t carnal pleasure, just forceful rutting as he is consumed by a desire to vindicate.
Revenge is a powerful narrative device. Every cop movie, gangster flick and crime thriller seems to rely on its allure; and almost every vigilante lauded in films is obsessed with meting out justice. It’s a moviegoer’s aphrodisiac. And the avenging violence of the final showdown is so universal that it apparently satisfies a primordial impulse. “Revanche” expresses the concept with a fresh, interesting and challenging twist. It is a long but smart and meticulous film of 121 minutes with a less cathartic resolution that still lingers intensely once the house lights come up.
