Revanche 2008 rapidshare

Though it's frequently said that revenge is a dish best served cold, Spielmann intriguingly turns the adage on its ear by suggesting that life—not death—is the ultimate vengeance. Cross-published on The Evening Class. Festivals Udine All Festivals December 28 , PM. Michael Guillen. Tweet Post Submit. Do you feel this content is inappropriate or infringes upon your rights? Click here to report it, or see our DMCA policy. Around the Internet. Be Anarchist! Subscribe to Screen Anarchy.

Recent Posts. January 13 , PM by Andrew Mack. January 13 , AM by J Hurtado. I mean it in a "you just learned something about your soul's redemption" kind of way.

I won't say diddly squat about the plot except to say it revolves around 4 characters: an amateur criminal in Vienna, his prostitute girlfriend, a young good-natured woman who lives in the country, and her husband who is a policeman.

A brutal event impacts the lives of these 4 people, leading one of them on a mission of, you guessed it, "revanche". Nothing is predictable, even though the story is perfectly composed in a way that will make you think it couldn't have happened any other way. The camera style is picturesque and slow, with many stationary, lingering shots as opposed to quick disorienting edits common in most crime thrillers.

There is no music aside from an old man occasionally squeezing out a tune on an accordion. But it's incredibly suspenseful up to the very end. A famous film figure whom I forgot once commented that all revenge flicks are nothing more than a 90 minute justification for 1 extreme act of violence. That's certainly true about every Steven Seagal flick I've ever seen, where it's expected that the audience will cheer rapturously at the end when a guy gets his eyeballs thumbed out before he's thrown down an elevator shaft only to land on a giant iron spike.

So if you ever feel like thumbing someone's eyeballs out, take a deep breath and watch this film instead. First of all, bravo to Qantas Airline for carrying this film gem among their on-board entertainment selections! I never would have thought I would see this Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language film on a plane. I did not really see any scenery that made it look like Austria at all. It is basically about four people: from the city, an Ukranian prostitute Tamara Irina Potapenko and her thug boyfriend Alex Johannes Krische , and in the countryside, an honest cop Robert Andreas Lust and his friendly wife Susanne Ursula Strauss.

Unusual circumstances intertwine and complicate the lives of these two couples in crime, death, guilt, and as the title says, revenge. The best aspect of this film is its very well-developed script, at least for the last two-thirds of the film. The first one-third building up the relationship of Tamara and Alex was too long and slow and even unnecessary. But when the time comes that Alex hatches his scheme to get the money they need to make their getaway, the film gains its necessary accelerating momentum to the very end.

For all its merits as a drama, this may not be a film for everyone. There are some graphic scenes and dialog as expected with a film that dealt with prostitutes. There are many slow repetitive scenes of Alex and his ailing dad, with so many scenes of Alex chopping wood or the dad playing the accordion which can test your patience to watch. As is typical with a lot of European films, the actual resolution of the entire problematic situation is left to the audience, but I felt that it was still the best way to end.

What we have here is,some very nice scenery and that is about all. We do have many scenes of the lead actor chopping wood. We also have scene after scene of some of the worst film editing since perhaps the silent era, when cameras did not move.

The film just ends,not one single plot element is resolved. This is wasted moments. There was not one single person in cast that was half-way likable. A love in the underworld between Russian prostitute Tamara Irina Potapenko and bordello body-guard Alex Johannes Krisch leads them to embrace the perspective of escape from the harsh realities of debts owed to crime bosses.

The solution to their worries is a bank heist, during which Tamara dies after being fatally wounded by a stray bullet from police officer Robert Andreas Lust. Engrieved Alex hides out at his grandfather's Johannes Thanheiser farm, where he spends his days chopping wood for the winter. However grief turns to concepts of vengeance, when it turns out that Robert and his wife Susanne Ursula Strauss are neighbours.

Starting off from a seedy, hopeless love affair, after a few scenes certainty of an emotional train-ride becomes evident. As the story unfolds and takes various turns, moral dilemmas take the forefront, as death, sorrow, remorse and regret construe a fascinating psychological story, where revenge isn't limited to a simple pulling of the trigger lacking forethought. As Alex, Robert and Susanne interact questions raised reach satisfying, if uneasy, conclusions, as a full circle is reached, making this one of the most poignant movies on the question of revenge, much detached from the typical Hollywood or Hong Kong take on the matter.

The story has a unmistakable natural flow partly owed to the settings and the camera-work , as happenings build the story without effort or forced connections. As if to underline this music score is done away with, only the noise of the streets and background of nature fill the space between infrequent dialogues.

If you were to read in the paper that a man had robbed a local bank and, as he drove away in the getaway car, a woman in the passenger seat had been shot and killed by an off-the-mark shot from a policeman, you would probably think, "Well that's unfortunate, if someone had to get killed, it should have been the robber. But, as this movie illustrates, the details of such an incident and its aftermath can be surprising and interesting.

The movie starts with Alex and Tamara working in a seedy Vienna brothel. Tamara is an attractive Ukranian and it is easy to see why Alex has fallen for her.

The realistic behind the scenes look at the brothel, run by a tyrannical pimp, was enough for me to understand why Alex and Tamara were desperate to escape and, when Alex proposed the bank robbery, I could well understand his motivation, since it was not going to be easy for either Alex or Tamara to get out of the rather sorry state they were in. What sets this thriller apart is that we get to know all of the main players--Alex, Tamara, the policeman and his wife, and Alex's grandfather-- as believable people.

Their interactions are well motivated and understandable. As the title suggests, the movie has important things to say about revenge, about snap judgments and false assumptions. I found some of the filming techniques interesting. Early on the camera lingered on certain scenes, like a path into some trees or an alleyway, that left me puzzled. The answers to these little teasers appeared later in the film. I did not know any of the actors, but I found them all to be well cast and quite good.

DeeNine-2 15 September This is a carefully orchestrated German language film set in and around contemporary Vienna. It is about how the desires and needs of men and women differ at the most fundamental level. The action concerns what can go wrong when you try to rob a bank, even when you use an unloaded gun.

There is an old saying in the theater that if you show a gun in the first act, it had better go off in the third act. Here director Gotz Spielmann plays a variant on that old stage business. We see something splash into a pond as the opening credits roll.

It is not clear what it is. The camera lingers as the concentric ripples spread out and then are done. Later on in the film we see the same scene from the point of view of the person who threw the object into the water. It is near the end of the film, in what in the theater would be the third act.

We want to strike out at some target. But what do we do when we have no target or when the target is innocent? And to what extent is the desire for revenge a way of absolving ourselves from what has happened?

Revenge is a standard, even hackneyed, movie theme. Action movies and thrillers often employ the psychology of revenge as both theme and plot device, as a way of keeping the audience emotionally involved.

Here revenge is used in a different and ultimately redemptive way. Early in the film the camera lingers on a street scene. We see a narrow alleyway like an urban street tunnel.

The camera holds that shot so that we expect to see someone or something emerging from that alleyway. But it is only later that the scene is revisited, and much like the pond scene mentioned above we see the scene from the opposite angle, and what transpires contains the central event of the movie. This sense of seeing scenes from different angles--opposite angles actually--is echoed in the opposing perspectives of the two women and the two men.

There is, for example, the symmetry of how the two men work off the psychological tension that they feel. Robert Andreas Lust , who is a cop who has accidentally shot and killed a young woman involved in a robbery, jogs. Alex Johannes Krisch , who is the boyfriend of the dead woman, a woman he loves very much, puts his physical energy into chopping wood--viciously.

For one it is the cardio and the legs; for the other it is the upper body. And then there are the two women: Tamara Irina Potapenko who is the young woman now dead, who was a prostitute, and Susanne Ursula Strauss who is the cop's wife. Both are very physical as women, both aware of the power of their bodies, but more significantly both are aware of their primeval need to understand men, and their ability to do just that. Susanne, who is thoroughly bourgeois, does something that is condemned by society in the same way that prostitution is condemned.

Yet she acts out of clear intent without a hint of shame or the sense that she is doing something essentially wrong. The prostitute acts out her societal role with a shrug of her shoulders as to society's hypocritical morality. Thus both women are morally and humanly the same. This is Spielmann's point, not to make moral judgments about the worth of either man or either woman.

The prostitute is the moral equal of the cop's wife, and cop's wife is the equal of the prostitute who sells her body. And the man who kills because his aim is bad is the same as the man who caused the death because of his criminal act and his carelessness.

And in a deeper, extended sense, the old man Alex's grandfather grows old and will die soon, but another life is stirring, and will be born to take its place in this world. And so it goes. It is not for us to pass judgment on the rightness or wrongness of any of this, except to say that revenge, as Susanne expresses it, is a "sin" whether you are a "believer" or not.

I hope to see more of his work in the years to come. Despite it's too long beginning the film never really lags and keeps your interest with it's slick story from Gschlacht and wonderful cinematography from Gotz Spielmann and a great production design by Maria Gruber.

Alex Johannes Krisch has fallen in love with Ukrainian immigrant Tamara Irina Potapenko who works in a brothel where Alex does odd jobs for the underworld brothel owner. In a plan to get out of debt and the control of the brothel Alex hatches a plot to rob a bank in his grandfather's rural village. Alex is forced to assimilate into the village when his plan is botched. With Ursala Strauss as the shopkeeper Susanne and Andreas Lust as her policeman husband Robert this is a good film but would carry a strong R rating for nudity and sexual situations.

Fortunately, violence is kept at a minimum. I would give it a 7. REVANCHE; Austria entry for the Oscars is a movie that starts pretty interesting; but after while; when the situation is completely presented, the pace slow down causing more tedium than suspense. There is a failed robbery; an accidental killing and a vengeance prospect; but besides the very forced setup; there is nothing else original or unexpected in it.

If you notice something unexpected it might because you felt asleep. Even the ending is lazy written. If you follow art house movies; there is a lot of commonplaces here; but that does not make it a good or even interesting movie unless you count the fair amount of nudity in it.

Despite this dramatic build-up, my post-film survey showed no one else gave this aquatic anomaly a second thought after it occurred. Being an experienced movie-watcher, I could not get the large watery plop out of my mind. Director Gotz Spielmann must have had an important purpose for his opening gambit; this portent seemed to prophecy some sort of cathartic release.

As the rest of the pieces of the REVENGE puzzle fell into place, mindfulness of the big splash proved crucial in nipping false expectations in the bud. Future viewers of this story can nitpick the acting, like rival commenter "kosmasp," or wrap their heads around the intriguing mystery of exactly WHAT the title word will consist of shooting bullets?

Revanche offers a refreshing glimpse of human beings in the real world, rather than fantasy lands where there are only heroes and villains. In this case, everyone makes mistakes and has good and bad sides to them. Interesting story set mostly in rural Austria. Well acted. I recommend. A quietly compelling, suspenseful film about the ability of the human being to redeem themselves through understanding, Revanche would probably be frustrating to those accustomed to the Multiplex thriller full of quick cuts, revved-up music and one explosion after another.

Like the author Dickens, director Spielman contrasts the gritty, downbeat lowlife in the big city with the honest toil and rich rewards of the country, and although the film starts to be about a simple bank heist, it becomes something else entirely; chopping wood becomes punctuation to the internal road the main character takes to self-understanding--while realizing that this is quite a heap of philosophy to lay on what becomes a cat-and-mouse thriller, there are plenty of surprises in store for the patient viewer who wants a film of some maturity and depth.

LazySod 6 May A guy and his woman. They both work in a brothel and are both working on their plan to escape that place for good. So far none of their plans have worked out and a new plan is devised. When the plan starts rolling the woman is anxious and afraid it will fail, but the man presses on. It all starts out really well, but it quickly turns sour. The rest of the film then is the more or less logical follow up of these events - with the one red line thought through it all being - getting even.

And that's saying a lot for a European "written and directed by" film, where narrative logic doesn't often get more than cursory consideration. The name "revanche" has a double meaning in German, both revenge and a return match or a second chance, and it seems that both of these ideas are being developed throughout the story, as characters juggle their need to get even with their desire to secure their own futures.

The tragic consequences of their every action lead them further and further down a path not of their own choosing. We get a taste of this feeling of predestination when the camera stops still at a forested point in the road, a spot that will take on fatal significance later in the story.

Yet, if fate controls the characters' destinies, it is the strength of willpower that will decide who survives and who will fade into insignificance. Revanche did not get nominated in any categories for the EFA awards in , but it is Austria's entry for the Oscar Foreign Language film nomination in Details Edit.

Release date May 16, Austria. German Russian. Waldviertel, Lower Austria, Austria. Prisma Film Spielmannfilm. Box office Edit. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 2 hours 1 minute. Dolby Digital. Related news. In profile: the 93 international feature Oscar contenders. Oct 8 ScreenDaily. Oct 4 ScreenDaily. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content. Top Gap. By what name was Revanche officially released in Canada in English?