"Revanche"

By David Hudson on 05/01/2009

[Updated]

"A character-driven fallout-from-crime tale full of midsummer sunlight and yearnings for redemption, 'Revanche' is almost fatally reluctant to get its hands dirty, its milieu shifting on a violent twist from a grimy Vienna brothel to the rural exurbs for buckets of guilt, angst, and frequently clumsy metaphors," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "Unlike his fellow Austrian, the sadistic ironist Michael Haneke, writer-director Götz Spielmann strives to identify with his crisis-laden characters' anguish, and is particularly aided by [Johannes] Krisch's grieving would-be avenger and [Ursula] Strauss's desperate, vulnerable hausfrau. But his most heavy-handed images undermine the grace notes of the actors."

"Directed with terrific control and economy of means by Spielmann - a film and theater vet who has had only one previous movie distributed in the US - 'Revanche' gets its hooks into you early and leaves them there," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice, "alternately suggesting a darkly romantic film noir in the vein of Nicholas Ray's 'On Dangerous Ground' (which navigates a similar journey from seedy urbanism to lyric countryside), a Strindbergian chamber play opened up for the great outdoors, and a Jacobean revenge drama stripped of its ceremonial bloodshed. Working with the cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, Spielmann favors fixed, spacious compositions, in which the action often drifts to the far corners of the frame, until we find ourselves craning our necks as if to peer around the edges of the screen."

You might call it a "webcam movie," suggests David Phelps in The Auteurs' Notebook, where Daniel Kasman interviews Spielmann. "The style develops out of Fassbinder, maybe, Warhol, or Dreyer's 'Gertrud,' with full-frontal tableaux of rooms as boxes: back walls, side walls, ceiling, and floor. Usually, the camera doesn't move, and there's almost never any cutting within a scene - each shot introduces a new room. Shots are self-contained, slabs of space and slabs of time."

"Mr Spielmann seems to be after a combination of starkness and psychological complication, and the result is a pileup of motives and implications that undermine the blunt impact of the story," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "But the characters and situations are interesting enough, and the filmmaking is sufficiently skilled to provide a measure of reasonably thoughtful entertainment."

"At times, 'Revanche' feels like a hard-boiled pulp novel with all the narration and much of the dialogue removed," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Between lurid scenes of sex and violence, Spielmann conveys the movie's most important information with economical images and actions that gain in meaning as they accumulate.... Though at times meticulous to a fault, 'Revanche' definitely conveys the feeling of looming danger, and the cold comfort of blame."

"[W]hile poised at the crossroads of shame and purgation, 'Revanche' works on the level of a higher-minded 'Death Wish,'" writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York.

"Instead of a bloody political thriller, something quiet, complex and unexpected emerges: a moral tragi-tale sans heroes and villains."Henry Stewart in the L Magazine.

This is "one of the most compelling assemblages of character studies I have seen so far in this too-often-dismal year of moviegoing," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

"There is a sense that the manner in which the whole comes together has been manufactured rather than having blossomed organically," finds James Van Maanen.

"A possibly great filmmaker has arrived to restore cinema's sanity against such sick minds as Neil LaBute, Michael Haneke, Lars Von Trier, Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes," announces Armond White in the New York Press.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Spielmann "about his writing process, the film's organic nature, and his take on Hollywood cinema."

Update: "What begins as a slice of gritty urban life or a film about lovers on the run is immediately upended with the chillier social commentary of suburban melodrama, which itself gives way to a heist picture, a psycho-sexual thriller, a brooding Tarkovskian mood-piece, and so on," writes Leo Goldsmith for indieWIRE. "Even so, 'Revanche' never feels like it's trying too hard, never fails to root what may have seemed genre-hopping gimmickry in its characters (both major and minor) and the repercussions of their actions."

[Photo: "Revanche," Janus Films, 2008]

Tags: Austrian Cinema, Götz Spielmann, Johannes Krisch, Revanche, Ursula Strauss