This review contains some spoilers.

 

A meandering first half gives way to a spectacular psychological portrait of the deafening silence of pain and loneliness in Austrian writer-director Götz Spielmann’s Revanche. The Berlinale Panorama title is the follow-up to Spielmann’s controversial 2004 feature Antares but it is not nearly as likely to raise eyebrows this time around, though the film an sich is certainly good enough to warrant critical attention. While Revanche’s first part is overly long and could use some serious pruning, Spielmann beautifully segues into a breathtaking portrayal of feelings that are hard to describe with words (no wonder then, perhaps, that dialogues are sparse and music is almost absent).

 

The film can be seen as another example of what is sometimes referred to as the Berlin School, a very loose group of German-language directors not only based in the German capital that includes Thomas Arslan (Dealer), Christian Petzold (Yella) and Valeska Grisenbach (Sehnsucht / Longing). Like their films’ short titles, the works themselves are austere, restrained and precise in locating complicated emotions. The directors often work with long takes that emphasise the visual over the verbal, while their stories focus on relatively straightforward protagonists who just try to deal with issues that come up in everyday life. In that sense, Revanche, though made in Austria, is a perfect example of a Berlin School film.

Two stories unfold that will eventually become inextricably linked in ways not always foreseen by all the players involved. In the first story, Alex (Johannes Krisch), an ex-inmate  working in a Viennese brothel dreams of a better life with his girlfriend Tamara (Irina Potapenko), a Ukrainian prostitute who works for the same boss (Hanno Pöschl), though he is unaware of their relationship. In the second story, Susanne (Ursula Strauss), a supermarket worker, and her police officer husband Robert (Andreas Lust) live a tranquil life together in a rural hamlet not far from Vienna. They are hoping for Susanne to become pregnant again, though because of an earlier miscarriage the baby room has remained empty until now.

When Robert becomes involved in a botched bank robbery staged by Alex and Tamara – who plan to start again elsewhere with the loot – the two stories are connected by a stray bullet and the sentiment of the title, but it soon becomes clear that both things are nothing more than connective tissue. When Alex finds refuge at the farmstead of his grandfather (Hannes Thanheiser) after the robbery, the lives of all characters are changed, with Spielmann using these changes to reveal his characters to the audience, and, to a certain extent, also to the characters themselves.

 

The most turbulent and obvious change is Robert’s breakdown after his involvement in the robbery, which Lust plays to perfection, but other changes are just beneath the surface. A series of unlikely encounters between Susanne, who calls on Alex’s grandfather every now and again, and Alex, who tries but seems to fail to channel his hatred into something more positive, are played with such honesty and filmed with such purity that they ring true. Strauss is especially effective in what could have been a throwaway role but instead becomes the quiet force of the film’s second half.

 

The austere cinematography of Martin Gschlacht is perfectly in synch with Spielmann’s script and direction, with the film’s opening shot of a stone thrown into a lake casting a menacing shadow over the film’s second part.

 

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