Take Your Revanche at SIFF Cinema

Revanche opens today and runs through May 13 at SIFF Cinema, over at McCaw Hall. It's in German, with subtitles, and runs two hours, but it ends up feeling like an implanted memory, as if you grew up with the people you were watching.

Which may surprise you, given that the leads are playing a Ukrainian prostitute and ex-convict. Tamara (Irina Potapenko) and Alex (Johannes Krisch) are stupid with their attraction for each other, and despite the rules against employee fraternization, spend a good deal of time eating pizza in and having very realistic looking stand-up, shower-, and floor-sex.

Academy Award-nominated Revanche, directed by Götz Spielmann, takes its time exposing you to the world Tamara and Alex are in retreat from, and to their humanity, which peeks out here and there in expressions and small gestures. But don't worry. Things do happen.

That's what brings small-town police officer Robert (Andreas Lust) and his wife Susanne (Ursula Strauss) into the picture, along with Alex's farmer grandfather (Johannes Thanheiser). Spielmann pits Viennese debauchery against small-town work ethic, hardness against overwhelming emotion, loss against loss. If you're fascinated by people working hard to make peace with a life that seems to have turned against them, this, by god, is the film for you.

And if you like a film that shows more than it tells, this is for you, too. Alex tries his best to look and sound hardened, but when you see him busily replacing the towels in a brothel cabinet, you see he cares too much. When you see him, on his grandfather's farm, splitting wood without let-up, you see he's been broken.

For us, Ursula Strauss was the stand-out in a cast you're apt to think of as being their characters, quirkily upbeat and kind despite her disappointments, but also willing to use--brutally, if necessary--what life hands her.