In Götz Spielmann's romantic thriller, ""Revanche,"" revenge is a dish best cooled by hot sex, incessant wood chopping and soul searching. Screened at the Wisconsin Film Festival this weekend and nominated for Best Foreign Film at this year's Academy Awards, ""Revanche"" is like a knotted piece of wood, entangling its characters and crisscrossing themes—from revenge and faith, to guilt and uncertainty—while presenting a nearly impenetrable sense of morality.
""Revanche"" begins with a split focus, paralleling the relationships of Alex (Johannes Krisch) and Tamara (Irina Potapenko)—a soft-hearted ex-con and a Ukrainian prostitute who works at ""the Cinderella,"" a Viennese brothel—and Robert (Andreas Lust) and Susanne (Ursula Strauss)—a police officer and his wife who has recently miscarried.
When Alex and Tamara skip town and head for the country, Alex decides to start their new life with a bank heist. After all, he tells Tamara while parked near the bank, ""nothing can go wrong.""
Sure enough, the robbery goes off without a hitch and Alex returns to the car within minutes only to find Robert, the aforementioned police officer, questioning Tamara about her lack of a passport. Charging in with his unloaded gun, Alex surprises Robert, forces him to lie down, and is well down the street before Robert can get up to shoot, missing the tires. Alex's relief is cut short, however, when he realizes a stray bullet has fatally wounded Tamara. In numbed shock, Alex abandons Tamara and the car in the forest, stumbling toward his father's house in the country.
Robert is psychologically shattered when he discovers his lethal misfire, and his gradual unraveling eats away at his already emaciated marriage. Susanne, racked by Robert's agonizing stress, starts to increase her visits to Hausner, an accordion-playing old man she sometimes keeps company. Well, wouldn't you know it? He happens to be Alex's father.
Avoiding over-simplification, the film brilliantly parallels each of the three characters' complex reactions to the accident, with Susanne acting as the link between Robert and Alex. In one interesting contrast, Alex summons vengeance by constantly looking at a glamour photo of Tamara, tacked to his bedroom wall, while a guilt-stricken Robert is haunted by a similar headshot of a dead Tamara, which he carries with him everywhere.
Neither man is presented as one-sided, though. Alex's vengeance is tempered by guilt, grief and doubt about Robert's intentions. More Hamlet than hell-bent. In the same way, Robert's guilt is fused with an angry loss of faith as he curses God for his bad luck.
The film is as much about the search for distractions as resolutions. Robert tries to clear his head with long jogs, Susanne turns to Alex, of all people, to solve her sexual frustrations, and the once soft-hearted Alex becomes distant, rigid and mechanical, approaching his father's wood pile and nocturnal visits to Susanne with the same machine-like brutality.
Although the film's mounting tension never snaps into a crisply cathartic finale, its questions of morality linger long after any climax ever could.
Grade: AB
