Alex (Johannes Krisch) and Tamara (Irina Potapenko) are boyfriend and girlfriend, but for complicated reasons they have to keep their relationship secret. They both work for the gangsters who run this Viennese brothel, she as a prostitute and he as a general dogsbody, running errands for their boss (Hanno Pöschl), but if he ever found out about them there would be trouble, which is why they dream of escaping someday soon if they manage to gather enough money together. To that end, Alex has a drastic plan: rob a bank, but his schemes become more imperative when the boss makes Tamara an offer for a promotion...
Revanche translates as "revenge" into English, but as a French word used in German, or Austrian in this case, it also means another try, another roll of the dice and so on. You can see why director Götz Spielmann opted to keep the original title no matter where this was released, as it is pertinent even if it needed to be explained for the foreign, non-German speaking audiences to "get" it, and there was no explanation in the film itself for their benefit. This was one of a certain type of deadpan dramas which proliferated throughout the arthouse cinemas of the globe, where as a reaction to the excesses of the mainstream everything was dialled right down.
You would have thought with so many middle distance camera shots, muted conversations and colours, and a general air of restraint - until something dramatic happens - something like this would need a method to stand out from the crowd, and for some viewers it did, but you would really have to be patient to get the most out of a work such as this. It begins with the sad story of Alex and Tamara, who although they don't go overboard in expressions of affection (though as we see, they have an active sex life) are clinging to each other for dear life in the seedy and oppressive world of the sex industry, which makes what happens to them when they try to struggle out of it all the more sad.
You can imagine both their lives are littered with poor choices, or at least troubles imposed on them by circumstance; we know Tamara, for example, is from Ukraine and she phones her family back there regularly, emphasising her loneliness, as does the broken German she speaks which illustrates her distance from everyone in the film except the loyal Alex. But in the second half, it's he who is the lonely one as the consequences of that bank robbery truly hit him and he seeks the revenge of the title, seeing to it that he has not wasted his life as he moves back in with his father in a rural area and plots a way to find value to an event which has ended with a pressing meaninglessness he cannot face up to.
It is here we meet the cop who almost arrested him, Robert (Andreas Lust) and his wife Susanne (Ursula Strauss) who are both trying and failing to have a baby, which sets up a fairly complex way of relieving the tension building up throughout the rest of the movie what with Alex a slow-burning fuse attached to emotional dynamite we know is about to go off. We can tell this thanks to many scenes of Krisch channelling James Brolin in The Amityville Horror, no, he doesn't get possessed, but he does spend an inordinate amount of time chopping wood in the barn, one of many sequences which ominously point to his increasingly fragile mental state. But then a funny thing happens: not funny ha ha, and not funny peculiar especially, but after a while where you're expecting an explosion of violence at the very least, Alex and the audience begin to twig that we may not be out of the woods yet (literally) and may never be completely, but it could be the worst has happened, and any moves to revenge would be pointless, thus the second chance arises. Chilly on the surface, but poignant too.
