Tuesday of your Discontent

One movie in the past two weeks...

REVANCHE

Another deceptively conventional film, because its style is so full of literal and metaphorical quiet and cavernous spaces that there’s a tremendous amount of room for a film-viewer to see some clear elements of other brooding neo-noir films in its tone. The immediate comparison I could make was with my experience of watching Handsome Harry, as I go through the motions of watching what I think to be a standard story of someone with a dark secret of their past, told with a familiar sequence of juxtaposed flashbacks, only to realize I was caught in a trap of expectations making the devastating ending almost completely counter-balance the flaws during the rest of the movie. Revanche (German for Revenge) was a case where I was in tune with the stark style, the director’s patience with character actions, and the expectation that the ending was going to be inconclusive in a typical modern indie foreign film way. I felt I had drank from this cinematic well before, even if this film was being executed near-perfectly. Then that ‘conclusion’, or lack of one, that I knew was coming became a haunting and unique way to tie up the loose ends the loose ends that had been created through the plot, but without created anything resembling a happy ending. You could almost visualize the sharply cornered geometric shape of tension created by the new place these characters are at… but the film seemed to suggest that this impasse would be far better than the risks of a more explosive situation. The tragedy at the center of the story created a limited range of outcomes… none of them pleasant… and our acceptance of these extremely uncomfortable but not horrifying circumstances is one of the most exceptional things about this movie.