REVANCHE

Revanche (dir Gotz Spielmann, Austria, 2008)

Revanche (Revenge) is a film from Europe looking very like an old Hollywood western. The storyline, for the film is narrative driven, concerns a couple, one a Ukrainian prostitute (Tamara), the other a craggy Austrian ex-con (Alex) who plan to go on the run after leaving Vienna and attempting a heist in a small village, then running over the border to lawless Spain (standing in for Mexico). The whole plans seems quite naïve (for an experienced ex-con) and the heist goes predictably wrong, as the local cop, a man with a true shot and a big conscience gets the girl in the back.

The film evolves out of a Vienna which is not like the Vienna of apfelstrudel and Mozart but more the Vienna of Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s The Third Man, a dark, sordid dive of a place replete with awful brothels, Russian lapdancers with their horrid, seedy pimps, awesome dumps looking, indeed, like awesome dumps. There’s a neat division between the city and the countryside, where the second half of the film takes place, which is contrastingly endearingly naïve. The ex-con turns out to be an ex-country bumpkin with aged da living out on an idyllic farm beside a large pond and the cop’s vast bungalow where his wife eventually takes Alex, fucks him, coincidentally impregnating herself with his craggy yet awesomely effective, fertile spunk.

The cop is meanwhile having a torrid time, accused initially of manslaughter by his bosses who attempt to play it, rightly by the book, obsessed by the prostitute Tamara, then cleanly incapable of making an impression on his wife either until she informs him that his baby is on the way, (yet, as we know, it isn’t really). Sometimes the film makes a gauche impression by making the viewer as innocent and uncritically naïve as the protagonists. The symbolism (the empty/loaded gun = impotence ??? and the statue of Jesus frowning ominously over the unfolding events) is heavyhanded, ultimately the tone unsure. Do we believe that women really can’t leave their husbands for the man they love? Do policemen worry this much? Do seemingly innocuous small villages really harbour such dark secrets?

There are no great answers to these questions here, but the film makes an intriguing, enjoyable melodrama nevertheless and it would be interesting so see where this director goes from here.

Paul Murphy

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