Revanche: BD Review
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Page 1 of 3 Criterion / 2008 / 122 Minutes / Unrated / Street Date: February 16, 2010
The anomalous member of The Criterion Collection that was confirmed as a Blu-ray Disc release from the company during the picture's theatrical run, Revanche is a bleak, old-fashioned pressure cooker of a film, a movie that follows as many crime-heist cinematic cliches as it destroys. This is the film's irresistible draw - with one foot in classic, almost noir-ish plot points and the other in the camp of loose-fitting, cerebral European art cinema, Revanche is that rarest of beasts, a movie that gives viewers exactly what they want in ways they never would have expected. Austrian director Gotz Spielmann makes his feature debut here with a thunderous impression - it's very difficult for a director to make a film that is simultaneously heavily, notably constructed and emotionally organic the way Revanche appears, and as a movie addict who sits through more ho-hum affairs than classics in a month, this prowess does not go unnoticed. Criterion has been a figurehead of making available classic cinema to a home entertainment audience, but with Revanche, they prove that their eye for important film can be applied to brand-spanking-new output, as well.
The film tells a two-tiered tale. One follows a haggard recovering con man named Alex (Johannes Krisch), who decides that the best thing for he and his hooker ladyfriend Tamara (Irina Potapenko) would be to rob a local bank, pay off the poor girl's debts and keep the rest of the money for himself in an attempt to be a partner in a Spanish nightclub in Ibiza. It goes without saying that this plan does not end well. The other tale in Revanche, though, follows a more esoteric track, taking time to investigate what life looks like for Alex when he flees to the countryside (at his grandfather's farm) and finds that not only does he need to atone for the sins of his past, but that the altruistic world he once coveted was never all that halcyon to begin with. Revanche is a film chock-full of consequence, misshapen allegiance and sticky, unsure redemption that plays as well as a thinking-man's crime flick as it does a palpable, tangible emotional drama. Not all of Spielmann's filmmaking instincts mine gold - some sequences in the picture don't carry the same gravitas as others - but Revanche is nevertheless a solid-gold debut, a movie that proves that sometimes the best way to subvert viewers' expectations with a film is to make them feel like they're getting exactly what they paid for (which is when you pull the rug out from underneath them). |
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