Revanche: The Criterion Collection (Blu-ray)

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"Revanche" (2008) tells two very familiar stories. In its telling of the first story, the "bank robbery gone wrong," it is decidedly unremarkable and even cliché riddled. When a would-be robber tells his girlfriend not once, not twice, but three times that "Nothing can go wrong," you can probably guess what´s coming especially when his foolproof master plan consists of brandishing an unloaded gun and ordering the teller to fill a bag with money. However, in its second story, that of the "criminal given a second chance," "Revanche" distinguishes itself from a host of similar films and achieves something rather special.

Alex (Johannes Krisch) works as a bouncer at a Vienna cathouse where his Russian prostitute girlfriend Tamara (Irina Potapenko) also works. He stages the robbery to help spirit her away to a better life. When his plans inevitably go awry, Alex retreats to the country home of his grandfather (Hannes Thanheiser) to lick his wounds and craft a new plan. Here his fate and Tamara´s become intertwined with that of his grandfather´s neighbors, Robert (Andrea Lust), a policeman on scene at the robbery, and the cop´s wife Susanne (Ursula Strauss.)

Alex, former bouncer and would be bandit, now spends his days chopping wood. Endlessly. Writer/director Götz Spielmann utilizes this basic chore as a metaphor for Alex´s attempt to reconstruct himself, body and soul, from point zero. A key to this is a return to nature. Alex starts by cutting the large chunks on an industrial-sized circular saw, creating the film´s most enduring (and menacing) sound effect. Later, he chops the smaller pieces by hand, grunting and sweating in the chill air. In the last scene, finally finished with his primal, seasonal labor, he plucks fallen winter apples right off the ground. It´s the necessary antidote to years of alienated labor working only for the profit of a calculating pimp masquerading as a legitimate business man.

Spielmann doesn´t waste time advancing his plot. When Alex first encounters Susanne in a supermarket, she immediately reveals that her husband is the officer involved with the robbery. Later when Alex spies on the couple, they are in the middle of a conversation about the incident and the profound effects it has had on Robert. It´s not coincidence so much as fate, the primary motivating force in the movie. "Revanche" is a model of stripped-down efficiency, a modern fable which draws broad parallels and depicts profound moral quandaries with an elegance and frankness rare in cinema. Alex has to decide whether he will deal with his grief and anger by lashing out revenge-movie style or forego the pleasures of violent catharsis in favor of a more difficult process of self-examination and re-molding.

Spirituality is always at the center of the film. Susanne and Alex´s grandfather go to church; Alex and Robert do not. Spielmann doesn´t equate that simply with good and bad, however. Alex and Robert are the ones plagued by guilt while Susanne is able to rationalize her own transgressions by claiming that her God is an understanding and forgiving one, a notion that Alex responds to with contempt.

Even more prominent is the sense of spirituality immanent in the environment. The film opens with a beautiful shot of a placid lake reflecting a ring of trees, a shot repeated near the end of the film. Alex also takes frequent trips into the woods by day and by night, and even when he works in the barn he often shares the frame with trees seen through an open door. Spielmann, who prefers sparsely populated long scale composition, also holds many shots for several beats after people have exited the frame: doorways, fields, etc. Each space, both natural and manmade, seems to hold something deeper and more powerful. A force lurks in every corner, imbuing the film with a pulsing energy even in the stillest shots.