Movie review: Revanche

If an object drops into a placid lake in the forest, will anyone care?

by John P. Meyer

Director/writer Götz Spielmann's Revanche was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar in 2009, representing Austria. (It didn't win.)

The film proved to be a tough watch for me, but that might be because of my preconceived notions about how a gritty, crime-themed drama ought to be made. Which should provide a clue that Spielmann and I disagree on this point.

The initial scenes of the film take place in a brothel in the city of Vienna. This modest establishment, whose decor and amenities are nothing to write home about, nevertheless features a variety of attractive young female employees, including a Ukranian immigrant named Tamara (Irina Potapenko) who is romantically involved with a brothel assistant named Alex (Johannes Krisch, maintaining a surly and nearly expressionless demeanor throughout).

What does a brothel assistant do, you might ask? Well, judging by Alex, he delivers fresh towels and linens to the rooms, and "motivates" the girls to stay on the job on those occasions when they'd rather just take a day off. He also acts as chauffeur for his sleazebag boss, Konecny (Hanno Pöschl), who tells him what a useless schlub he is as a means of motivating him on to bigger and better things, one supposes. (Not an atypical management technique, in my experience.)

Austria has not been good to Tamara, and it's about to get even less so -- because her dour boyfriend has a plan to get them both out of their workaday ruts (and usurious debt). Unfortunately, his plan involves robbing a bank, and neither of them are likely to ever be mistaken for John Dillinger. They begin their heist by parking in a No Parking zone, and things go from bad to worse from there.

Up to this point in the film the viewpoint has shifted back and forth from the sleazy side of Vienna to an anonymous country locale, which features a man mowing his lawn, a woman staring out the window at him, and the farmstead of an old man who we come to find out is the grandfather of our brothel assistant, Alex. There are no segues or explanations involved in any of this scene-shifting, and there is no musical scoring anywhere in evidence -- which makes for a rather tedious viewing experience.

Further, there is not a great deal of emotion displayed on the part of any of the actors. Konecny, who would likely be played with a leer and a scowl in an American-made film, here seems downright mild-mannered as he offers his female employees a chance at better lodgings if they'll consent to "date" his VIP clients. Even when he's soliciting "personal services" from Tamara, he does so in such a businesslike and inoffensive manner that we have a hard time considering him villainous. For her part, Tamara seems indifferent to the depersonalizing abuse being heaped upon her: crying might have been called for, even a bit of frowning or sniveling -- SOMETHING to let us know that she's a person with feelings rather than a robotic functionary. (Maybe we should blame the coke, which she snorts -- perfunctorily -- at every opportunity.)

After the botched robbery (which ends with Tamara being shot and killed), we find ourselves interested for the first time in what's going on on the screen. Our focus shifts unexpectedly to the countryside, where Alex holes up at the farm of his grandfather (Johannes Thanheiser). There, he begins sawing and splitting logs. With a vengeance.

Speaking of which: Alex soon discovers that Susanne (Ursula Strauss), the chatty neighbor lady who spends so much time looking after his grandfather, is married to the policeman whose errant shot killed his girlfriend Tamara. Susanne and her husband Robert (Andreas Lust) live just across a forested glade from Grandfather Hausner's place, leading Alex to brood on the possibility of doing some shooting of his own.

He stakes out Robert's daily jogging route, loads the pistol he used in the robbery (for the first time) and packs it along with him. Robert's jogging path ends at a tranquil pond in the forest, located somewhere between Robert's place and Grandpa Hausner's.

With each trip into the forest, Alex seems to be building murderous resolve. He punctuates his shadowing operations with ever more enthusiastic logsplitting, until enough firewood has accumulated to heat the homes of every domicile in the village for an entire winter.

From out of nowhere, Susanne throws a monkey wrench into everyone's expectations by conspiring to overcome her husband's infertility problems in the most expedient way possible: she invites the surly, uncommunicative, downright obnoxious (but potentially fertile!) woodchopper over to the house for some wine. And trysting.

By the time Revanche comes to its abrupt conclusion, we've learned the secret of what made the ripples on the still pond glimpsed at the very beginning of the film -- 121 minutes earlier. But by that time, can anyone possibly still care?