After the film left a considerable impression at the Wisconsin Film Festival this past April, the Orpheum has unsurprisingly brought back Austrian director Götz Spielmann's 2008 drama ""Revanche"" for a return engagement. Aside from winning over Madison audiences last spring, ""Revanche"" was also nominated for the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film—which isn't to say that being nominated for that particular award at all verifies a movie's alleged quality or effectiveness.
From an aesthetic standpoint, there's a lot to like about ""Revanche."" Though the film's arty goals are a bit obvious, it's difficult to object to Martin Gschlacht's detached cinematography or Spielmann's technique of stretching the duration of shots past the point when the character being studied has exited the frame. The first half of ""Revanche"" taps into a vivid yet nocturnal palette of colors that recalls John Cassavetes' ""The Killing of a Chinese Bookie."" Gschlacht's use of shallow focus effectively veils much of the onscreen space, yielding compositions that are delicate and slightly opaque. ""Revanche"" is at its best when it riffs on the conventions of the so-called ‘European art film'—several pivotal moments in the plot are noticeably suppressed, and yet they manage to retain their essential force.
Because of the content of the film's narrative (in which prostitution and marital infidelity are central topics), a substantial amount of nudity is required from actresses Irina Potapenko and Ursula Strauss. For the most part, the nudity is tastefully rendered and impregnated with philosophical weight by Spielmann's insistence on not only showing us sloppy sex in a cramped Viennese shower stall but also the mundane aftermath that follows the carnal act. Even so, Spielmann's obsession with breasts is pretty apparent throughout ""Revanche,"" especially in sequences where Potapenko or Strauss are lying in bed with their tits out, delivering some crucial line of dialogue as mediated by the presence of a pair of elephants in the room. It's tough to say whether this harmless perversity makes ""Revanche"" a richer cinematic experience or a more gratuitous one: As a 20-year-old single dude, I hardly think I'm in the right position to make such a judgment.
But beyond the debatable necessity of the nudity in ""Revanche,"" there's another detractor worth bringing up: For better or worse, the film is utterly driven by its narrative. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with a movie that seeks primarily to tell a story, so long as that story is worth telling. The problem with the narration in ""Revanche"" is that the storytelling motive is manifest in every image and every sound, to the point that anyone who thinks cinema can be a means of metaphysical investigation likely won't find much to chew on. Furthermore, the plot consistently walks the fine line between dragging and drifting: While the kitchen-sink realism of the first half definitely floats more than it sinks, the bulimic lyricism of the second half seems to prefer a steady drag to a dreamy drift.
""Revanche"" is as difficult as the subject matter it tries to come to grips with. There are moments when the film's story resembles a James M. Cain novel, just as there are moments when the film's compositions resemble the work of Spielmann's directorial peer and countryman Michael Haneke. On the whole, however, ""Revanche"" is more brooding than reflective, more parochial than investigative and more content to tell a complex story in a simple way than to tell a simple story in a complex way; whether the latter is preferable to the former for any of these is a whole 'nother can of worms.
