OVP: Revanche (2008)

Film: Revanche (2008)
Stars: Johannes Krisch, Irina Potapenko, Ursula Strauss, Hanno Poschl, Andreas Lust, Hannes Thanheiser
Director: Gotz Spielmann
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Austria)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I see a lot of movies.  A lot.  Literally 1-4 every single week.  There's a reason you see so many reviews on this blog (it's not for films I saw months ago, but generally for ones that I just saw).  And as a result of this, it takes a bit for a film to throw me off.  I generally see certain tropes coming, mostly because you're meant to expect certain cues when specific things happen (you could just listen to the soundtrack of most movies and know precisely what is happening onscreen).

(Spoilers Ahead) However, that wasn't the case for Revanche, a movie I recently partook of in preparation for the upcoming 2008 OVP (I've got seven movies left to view for that year, and I may have to revisit one or two as it's been six years since I've seen some of these films, but we should launch by November 1st).  Revanche was Austria's nominee at the 2008 Oscars, and it starts off in a way that you sort of expect what will happen.  Frequently foreign film nominees deal with dark and dire circumstances, and as a result when I saw a prostitute onscreen alongside a scummy pimp and a man who is perhaps her client, perhaps her boyfriend, I figured this was going to be a film struggling around our central Tamara (Potapenko) and her hopes to find a better life outside of the grips of a sex trade.

That's what I thought would happen, but I was in fact incredibly wrong.  Revanche is instead a movie about expecting the unexpected, which is what the audience gets when the film changes pace halfway through the movie (again, spoiler alert, because you should definitely see this movie).  Halfway through the picture, Tamara and her boyfriend Alex (Krisch) decide to rob a bank to solve their money problems, and in the process Tamara is accidentally killed by a randomly passing-by policeman (this is after Alex told her not to come along for the crime).  Initially we expect that he'll be nursing her back-to-health and then realizing she needs to go to a hospital, but no, Gotz Spielmann pulls a Janet Leigh in Psycho on us and has her die about halfway through the movie, despite her being our central protagonist in the picture.

This means that Alex is now without the love of his life with a fortune in stolen money, and moves in with his grandfather.  He decides to plot revenge against the policeman who accidentally shot Tamara, but in the process starts up an affair with the policeman's wife, who is struggling to have a child.  As the film unfolds, he gets the wife (Susanne, played by Strauss) to have a complicated affair with him, and as a result she gets pregnant (which she can't in her marriage because her husband has fertility problems).  The film closes not with a comeuppance for Alex or the husband Robert dying or Alex getting arrested, but instead simply with Susanne realizing who Alex was, and realizing that because he got her pregnant, she will never be able to tell her husband the story for fear of it ruining their happy future life together.  The movie closes on Susanne, realizing the secrets she's about to keep in the hope of having a better life, and Alex realizing that he needs to move on, knowing that he got away with the crime but will never have the happiness he expected and must strive not to be bitter.

The film is wonderfully-plotted, a compact thriller with multiple turns, frequently going in directions you wouldn't quite expect (I love that Alex continually has opportunities to kill Robert but never takes them, as would be so easy for the plot, instead giving us the more satisfying "too many secrets" style ending).  The acting is also superb-Strauss in particular is wonderful as a woman partially bored, partially struggling from emotional starvation, and frequently someone desperately trying a way out of an unsolvable problem.  I like that she makes bad decisions and nothing happens from them aside from some emotional scarring (this happens so often in real life where you do something bad but no one ever finds out-in movies or television someone always finds out); realism is an underutilized tool of the storyteller.  I also loved the way that her attraction to Robert isn't ever clarified-is she just into him because he's a good lay (she seems to enjoy it) or because she's lonely or is he simply a viable sperm option?  These unanswered questions leave you pondering a thought-provoking, chilling, but never gimmicky movie that I am so glad Oscar led me toward.

Those are my thoughts on the film-have any of you seen it (and if not, what are you waiting for?)?  Where does this rank in your personal OVP for 2008?  And if you haven't seen Revanche, what are some movies that you didn't see the twists coming on?  Share in the comments!