Revanche
1.
Revanche is German word that means “revenge”. In Austrian dialect, the word may also mean “rematch” or “gift” (as given in reciprocal exchange) or, even, “second chance.” In German, Revanche is an unusual word, with a Romance (French/Italian) flavor. The customary and much more frequently used German word for “revenge” is Rache, a word derived from the Old High German wreak (also Old English). Fritz Lang’s film Kriemhild’s Rache (Kriemhild’s Revenge) is an example of typical usage. (Another word for “revenge” in German, also much more common than Revanche is Vergeltung or “retaliation/retribution” or revenge.) If you are interested, Nietzsche’s, a philosopher who is much concerned with ideas of “revenge”, uses the French word resenttiment (“resentment”) for the emotional state that triggers the desire or will for revenge. In modern German, Revanche seems most commonly used in a jocular sense by sports writers with a desire to dramatize one team, for instance, a soccer club seeking Revanche on opponents in the light of a previous humiliating defeat.
2.
Goetz Spielmann was born in Weis, Austria in 1961. He lived in Paris for few months after completing his High School education and, then, attended college in Vienna in theater arts and filmmaking (Wiener Filmakademie). After some estimable student work, he made some TV movies and, then, a series of about eight highly regarded feature films, all of them well-reviewed in Austria and the German-speaking world, but, generally, unknown in the United States. Before making the film Revanche, he directed Antares, a movie that was also well-received, shown briefly in some art-houses in the US, and, also, somewhat controversial because of its explicit sex scenes. The high point in his career seems to be 2009's Revanche, released world-wide and nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign film in that year. (The film lost to Departures, a Japanese picture directed by Yojira Takito and completely forgotten today.) After Revanche, Spielmann made October, November (2013), a picture about a gathering of family members at a mountainside villa in Austria. The movie wasn’t released in the United States. After that picture, Goetz Spielmann has inexplicably fallen silent.
3.
Spielmann characterizes Revanche as being constructed in terms a distinction between city and country. The city is the world of commerce. (For Spielmann, commerce in its most naked paradigm is prostitution; modern Capitalism requires workers to sell themselves.) The country is the realm of nature which is the opposite of the moral and esthetic norms that prevail in the City. The tragedy in Revanche arises from the urban characters importing city values involving money and competition into the nature – that is, the attempted bank robbery in the country with its dire consequences.
4.
Spielmann has said that a film should be chaotic to the point of seeming almost unintelligible, but, nonetheless, remain sufficiently ordered for the audience to perceive that there is a plot or some articulable narrative. Good films arise from the clash between chaos and order. Spielmann causes this clash “complexity”, a good thing, he says, in movies. Complexity is an integral part of relations and communication between people. A closely observed conversation, Spielmann says, is an intricate duet in which words are always verging on mutual unintelligibility.
5.
Chaos, Spielmann argues, enters our lives through what he calls Schicksalschlage (“the blows of fate”). In Revanche, fate has hammered the old farmer Hausner by taking away his wife. Alex suffers the death of his girlfriend, Tamara. Robert bemoans his bad luck, “the blow of fate”, that has caused him to accidently shoot a bystander (Tamara) when he fires his weapon during the getaway from the bank robbery. Robert is also a victim of fate (“bad luck”) in that he’s unable to impregnate his wife, Susanna. These different Schicksalschlage drive the plot and entangle the characters is the film’s fateful narrative.
6.
Spielmann argues in favor of cinematic minimalism and simplicity. He wants his scenes to be “simple, precise, and natural.” Anything that distracts the audience from paying close attention to the words and images shown on screen must be eliminated from the film. Therefore, Spielmann is generally opposed to using a composed musical score or soundtrack. He argues that non-diagetic music (composed sound and music cues) distracts the viewer. Similarly, Spielmann endorses long takes without flashy cutting or quick edits. He’s generally against montage because such techniques draw attention to themselves and oust the viewer from direct participation with the characters and landscapes in the movie.
7.
Goetz Spielmann’s career after making Revanche is a puzzle. Revanche was acclaimed in 2008 as the Austrian director’s international “break-through” movie, the film that would establish him as an important filmmaker on the international stage. But this didn’t happen. He made one more feature film October, November released in 2014 and, then, hasn’t made anything else until 2022 when he directed a 89 minute TV show in the series LandKrimi, a very popular program in Austria that presents murder mysteries, each episode set in a different province or region of that country. Spielmann’s effort, entitled Der Schutzengel (“The Guardian Angel”) is set in Niederoesterreich. I’ve read a summary of the plot on LandKrimi’s website and the show sounds like a fairly standard TV crime mystery in line with popular programs of the same kind in Germany and produced by the BBC. Spielmann is married, has a daughter, and reportedly teaches screenwriting at the Wiener Filmakademie, his alma mater. Films made in Austria are heavily state-subsidized. (For instance, Revanche was largely funded by the Vienna Filmfond.) And, so, it seems unlikely that lack of funding is an issue silencing Spielmann. One can speculate as to the reasons for his vanishing from feature film production, but there is really no information available on the topic.
8.
A stickler for realism, Spielmann shot the Vienna sequences, in part, in a real bordello. Irina Portapenko (Tamara) went to a real whorehouse and was hired to work there. She spent a few nights shadowing the prostitutes and learning their approaches to the business. Portapenko, who is Ukrainian and was born in Crimea, drank Sekt (champagne) with customers and practiced pole-dancing. How much farther she went with her research has not been reported. Similarly, Johannes Krisch who plays Alex spent several days working as a bouncer in a Vienna brothel.
Andreas Lust who plays the policeman Robert also trained with the cops employed Gfoehl, one of the locations in the Waldviertel (Western Woods quarter) where the film was shot. He went to house-parties with the police and their families and practiced shooting his service weapon on the firing range. Gfoehl is a village with 3400 inhabitants. In it’s the province of Krems, a hot bed for Austrian extreme right-wing politics. The Mayor recently said that all journalists who report sympathetically on foreign asylum-seekers should be hanged. (The bank robbery scene was also shot in Gfoehl.)
9.
Revanche’s opening shot of a pond into which an object mysteriously falls is virtually identical to the first scene in Monty Hellmann’s 2010 Road to Nowhere. In that movie, the camera lingers on a gloomy reservoir for a minute or two before a small airplane plunges straight down into the dark water. Whether there is any relationship between the two films is doubtful, but the “tease,” as it were, is the same – it will take the rest of the film for the audience to figure out why the plane crashed in that way or what it was that drops into the pond in Revanche.
The end of the film in Revanche doesn’t exactly clarify this situation. The shot at the end of the film doesn’t match the opening sequence. In Revanche’s last shot, we see a mysterious squall blow over the water, stirring the reflective surface of the pond. This is not what we see in the first shot in which the object dropped into the water creates a series of concentric ripples on the surface of the pond which, then, abate without any afflatus of wind. The last image in Revanche is enigmatic and seems to allude to Tarkovsky’s films.
What accounts for the difference? What does the gust of wind mean?
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