Revanche
Written and directed by Gotz Spielmann. With Johannes Krisch, Irina Potapenko, Andreas Lust, Ursula Strauss, and Hannes Thanheiser. (NR)
Revanche, an Oscar-nominated film from Austrian writer/director Gotz Spielmann, is an interesting, meditative mix of underworld thriller and quiet moral tale whose weighty sense of sadness and regret eventually comes to touch almost all of the characters in its tightly knit story. Bookended by scenes of rippling waves spreading over still water, the scenes in-between reflect on how a single disturbance can leave an aftermath of unintended consequences in its wake.
Johannes Krisch stars as Alex, a taciturn ex-con who works as a low-level gofer and maintenance man at a Viennese brothel named, grotesquely, The Cinderella. Between rousting oversleeping sex workers and hauling cases of cheap beer, he's carrying on a sub-rosa relationship with Tamara (Irina Potapenko), a young Ukranian woman working off a debt as an indentured prostitute. Sex trafficking has become something of a familiar plot point lately in certain arthouse circles—and some of the film's early scenes play out like a softcore exploitation flick—but its unsavory details don't seem to bother Alex until he catches Tamara's boss ordering a thug to beat her into accepting what he unconvincingly calls a promotion.
Spurred by an unexpected tenderness and a glimpse of a happier future, Alex concocts a plan that he believes will let him and Tamara start over, only to see it go terribly, needlessly wrong because of a chance encounter. Afterward, he retreats to his grandfather's farm in the countryside, where fate presents him the opportunity for a number of forms of revenge.
If that seems vague, it's meant to be. Spielmann's film is divided in two at that point, into urban hardness and rural fertility; hope and remorse; motion and stillness. To give away how he navigates that change would be to rob the viewer of the film's most emotional moment. On either side of it, characters retreat into themselves—each of them has a reason for not sharing—without knowing how connected they are. Alex chops wood as his grandfather Hausner (a wonderful Hannes Thanheiser) plays accordion for Susanne, a lonely neighbor with a rocky marriage. Her husband is a police officer.
How it all resolves isn't a very big surprise—it doesn't need to be. Revanche is a film whose strengths are less in its story than in its telling. Spielmann is a patient, quiet director—in the silence of the country, the old man's creaky accordion is the film's only soundtrack—and he is content to let us watch as Alex slowly makes his way through his woodpile.
Also this week: Ending its run as part of Amherst Cinema's Essential Cinema series is Federico Fellini's 1974 classic Amarcord, which screens Thursday evening. Set in the fictional Italian village of Borgo (a stand-in for Fellini's hometown of Rimini), the film depicts provincial life during the 1930s, a time when popular support for the fascist regime of Mussolini was at its highest point. But if audiences are used to facile portrayals of the era's dictators, Fellini is too good a filmmaker to simply point fingers.
Instead, he focuses on the everyday lives of the townspeople of Rimini: local beauty Gradisca, a hairdresser who shaves the heads of Fascists; poor, doomed Giudizio, the village idiot; and a motley assortment of teachers, tobacconists, and prostitutes who live their lives in a kind of immature and adolescent ecstasy, unable to accept—or even recognize—the basic moral responsibilities of adulthood. Rich with the playfully stylish touches that mark all of Fellini's work, Amarcord, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, is a big-screen experience the likes of which few directors can deliver so well.
As Fellini departs, the series drifts northwest, to the noir France of Fran?ois Truffaut and his 1960 tour de force Shoot The Piano Player, a witty, stylish film that is equal parts thriller, comedy and tragedy. The French singing icon Charles Aznavour stars as Charlie, a seemingly innocent piano player in a Parisian dive who is dragged into the criminal underworld when his brother Chico, a petty crook on the run from gangsters, takes shelter in Charlie's bar.
But Charlie has a story of his own as well—a tragic personal history that brought him to the bar in the first place, and into a relationship with Lena, a cocktail waitress. Truffaut uses the then still-novel technique of voiceover to take us inside Charlie's thought process as he navigates his new relationship, one move among many that keeps the film feeling fresh even in the wake of a decade's worth of gangsters-on-the-run movies born of Tarantino and his imitators.
Another film screening this week, while not officially a part of the Essential Cinema series (it runs under the Zero Hour Film Series flag), has been arguably more influential than all the Truffauts and Fellinis of the world combined. That film would be George Romero's on-the-cheap undead extravaganza Night of The Living Dead. It screens at midnight (of course) on Saturday, May 23 at Northampton's Pleasant Street Theater, and the presenters, in addition to offering a reduced ticket price of three dollars, are hosting a "zombie contest" and raffle; presumably, their exhortation to "dress to impress!" means that your tux should be creased, stained with graveyard dirt, and spattered with brains.
Sui generis yet instantly recognizable, Romero's 1968 horror flick has something for everyone: cannibalism and necrophilia are just the tip of this rotting iceberg. The basic story—the recently deceased are mysteriously reanimated, and begin to eat the living—is both ridiculous and somehow primal, a fear of the dark made corporeal. As the growing army of zombies continues its march, their still-breathing quarry struggle to maintain their humanity as their panic turns them against each other.
But in the long run, perhaps the most interesting things about Night of The Living Dead are the circumstances of its birth, and what they say about independent filmmaking in America in a time when so many "independent" films are helped along by arms of the major studios. (Most truly independent films never reach theaters, although often, one assumes, with good reason.) Romero, on the other hand, basically raised the money for his film himself, and had to use hams as stand-ins for flesh, Bosco chocolate syrup for blood, and old clothes for the cast's wardrobe. Unable to afford color film, he shot in what, in retrospect, seems like an inevitable black and white, giving the movie what film historian Joseph Maddrey called "the unflinching authority of a wartime newsreel." But most of all, the constraints of Romero's filmmaking process meant that his movie was truly his—a feeling many of today's young directors are likely to envy.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
