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Too much of everything

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Blistering performances.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Both Alex and Tamara work in a Vienna brothel, while they carry on a secret relationship. To improve their life and pay off Tamara's debts, Alex decides to rob a bank and things get out of control when a policeman shows up on his getaway. It's a drama movie that creates tensions and the revenge story was told in a different suspenseful way. More than a revenge story, it actually deals with humans emotional behavior and how they approach to a serious situation. The story is unpredictable and most of the things that happened in it looks real to me. Overall, I like this movie and To be frank, it's not everyone's cup of tea.

Alex is an ex-con muscle in a brothel. He's in love with Ukrainian prostitute Tamara. She still owes money while he needs money to buy into a bar in Ibiza. They go to rob a bank and make a getaway. Police officer Robert finds Tamara waiting in the getaway car. Alex returns after the bank job and Robert shots at the fleeing couple. Tamara is killed, Robert is guilt-ridden and Alex hides out at his grandfather Hausner's farm. Alex discovers Robert is living nearby and has an affair with his wife Susanne.I really love the direction of the first part of the movie. When Tamara gets killed, the movie loses a bit of steam for me. I don't find Robert's guilt that compelling and therefore his marriage not that compelling either. It also doesn't help that they aren't in the movie until much later. Robert's police relationship seems wrong. I think they're investigating him for manslaughter and anybody in his position would be treated by a psychiatrist. Although I understand the attempt for a Greek tragedy, I don't really buy it. The first half is terrific and the second half has a few problems.

Although "Revanche" was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, it is NOT for everyone. That's because there is lots of nudity (including frontal), violence, drug use and a variety of other nastiness. So, it's NOT a film you show your young kids, mother-in-law or Father Jenkins! Plus, many folks just don't want to see a film this explicit. Had I known it was like this, I might not have rented the film. Plus, so much of the explicitness in the film seemed unnecessary for advancing the plot.The film is about a couple of lovers who are difficult to like--you might feel a bit sorry for them, but they are not folks you'll like. Alex is an ex-con and Tamara is a prostitute who is heavily in debt. When Tamara's pimp starts getting violent, the two escape--but they need money to leave the country. So, Alex robs a bank and in the process Tamara is shot and killed. Alex loved Tamara very much and he toys with the notion of finding the cop who shot her and getting revenge. This plan gets easier when it turns out the cop's wife knows Alex's father--an odd coincidence, I know. But there turns out to be a lot more to it than this--and the course of the film took me a bit by surprise. I won't say more--it would spoil the movie.The plot for "Revanche" and the acting were excellent. As I said above, however, it was hard to like the characters and so much nudity makes it a very good film that many won't ever get to see. Now I am not saying all of it should have been eliminated and some of the sexual content was definitely necessary for the plot.

This is a carefully orchestrated German language film set in and around contemporary Vienna. It is about how the desires and needs of men and women differ at the most fundamental level. The action concerns what can go wrong when you try to rob a bank, even when you use an unloaded gun. There is an old saying in the theater that if you show a gun in the first act, it had better go off in the third act. Here director Gotz Spielmann plays a variant on that old stage business. We see something splash into a pond as the opening credits roll. It is not clear what it is. The camera lingers as the concentric ripples spread out and then are done. Later on in the film we see the same scene from the point of view of the person who threw the object into the water. It is near the end of the film, in what in the theater would be the third act."Revanche" in German means "revenge." We all know how hard it is to forsake revenge when we have been hurt. We want to strike out at some target. But what do we do when we have no target or when the target is innocent? And to what extent is the desire for revenge a way of absolving ourselves from what has happened? Revenge is a standard, even hackneyed, movie theme. Action movies and thrillers often employ the psychology of revenge as both theme and plot device, as a way of keeping the audience emotionally involved. Here revenge is used in a different and ultimately redemptive way.Early in the film the camera lingers on a street scene. We see a narrow alleyway like an urban street tunnel. The camera holds that shot so that we expect to see someone or something emerging from that alleyway. But it is only later that the scene is revisited, and much like the pond scene mentioned above we see the scene from the opposite angle, and what transpires contains the central event of the movie. This sense of seeing scenes from different angles--opposite angles actually--is echoed in the opposing perspectives of the two women and the two men.There is, for example, the symmetry of how the two men work off the psychological tension that they feel. Robert (Andreas Lust), who is a cop who has accidentally shot and killed a young woman involved in a robbery, jogs. Alex (Johannes Krisch), who is the boyfriend of the dead woman, a woman he loves very much, puts his physical energy into chopping wood--viciously. For one it is the cardio and the legs; for the other it is the upper body.And then there are the two women: Tamara (Irina Potapenko) who is the young woman now dead, who was a prostitute, and Susanne (Ursula Strauss) who is the cop's wife. Both are very physical as women, both aware of the power of their bodies, but more significantly both are aware of their primeval need to understand men, and their ability to do just that.Susanne, who is thoroughly bourgeois, does something that is condemned by society in the same way that prostitution is condemned. Yet she acts out of clear intent without a hint of shame or the sense that she is doing something essentially wrong. The prostitute acts out her societal role with a shrug of her shoulders as to society's hypocritical morality. Thus both women are morally and humanly the same.This is Spielmann's point, not to make moral judgments about the worth of either man or either woman. The prostitute is the moral equal of the cop's wife, and cop's wife is the equal of the prostitute who sells her body. And the man who kills because his aim is bad is the same as the man who caused the death because of his criminal act and his carelessness.And in a deeper, extended sense, the old man (Alex's grandfather) grows old and will die soon, but another life is stirring, and will be born to take its place in this world. And so it goes. It is not for us to pass judgment on the rightness or wrongness of any of this, except to say that revenge, as Susanne expresses it, is a "sin" whether you are a "believer" or not.At any rate, this is a finely wrought and beautifully realized film by a gifted cinematic artist who explores the human condition with sensitivity and candor while eschewing clichés and easy answers. I hope to see more of his work in the years to come.(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)