Revanche (15) 121 mins ***Cléo From 5 to 7 (PG) 90 mins ****
Iron Man 2 (12A) 124 mins ***
An Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Picture in early 2009, Revanche has taken its while to reach UK screens, and that unhurried movement is typical of Götz Spielmann’s film as a whole. Consider the opening shot of a lake: utterly placid, until a rock breaks the surface and initiates a ripple effect that foresees the events to come. Such keen attention to the consequences of violent actions marks Revanche as a crime movie very much of the Austrian school: like a genre reworking of Ulrich Seidl’s gruelling 2008 drama Import/Export, it’s clear-eyed about the centrality of sex and money to the current world order, but comes to temper its bleakness with seeds of hope.
It begins as grungy urban character study. Alex (Johannes Krisch), lank-haired, handlebar-moustached enforcer at a Viennese brothel, is planning to clear his debts, and those of his Slavic sex worker sweetheart Tamara (Irina Potapenko), in one go. Disconcertingly, Alex’s manoeuvrings are intercut with those of Robert (Andreas Lust), an upwardly mobile trainee patrolman. The jolt we feel is that of a film vaulting between haves and have-nots, or between different strata of have-nots: where Alex and Tamara’s potency is self-evident, Robert and wife Susanne (Ursula Strauss) have thus far failed to conceive the child they so badly want. Eventually, these lives collide; inevitably, casualties ensue.
After this fateful collision, Revanche relocates to the country and finds its true focus: on men torn up with grief over the same incident, yet set against one another (and themselves) on courses of destructive behaviour. Alex resolves to screw over his nemesis - not just a cop, but a representative of a lifestyle unavailable to him - any way he can. Matters threaten to turn nasty: Spielmann’s compatriot Michael Haneke would surely relish the prominence given to the bandsaw in Alex’s woodshed. Keep in mind the title’s multiple meanings, though; that this archaic term for vengeance can also speak to comebacks, second chances. The film shifts into a softer, novelistic key, one in which renewal and even redemption become possible.
As such, this is another of Oscar’s overseas nominees for which one might well imagine an American remake, although the distinctive atmosphere of Mitteleuropan foreboding Spielmann cultivates would surely be non-transferrable. Some of Spielmann’s ironies - having Robert confronted with his delighted colleagues’ baby photos, say - feel obvious, and the plotting tends towards diffuseness in places; it takes nearly two hours to reach the watershed moment where we learn who threw that rock, and why. Yet if the pacing here is wilful, it’s the better to allow us to observe the great healers present in Revanche - time, nature, hard work, women - patiently going about their own essential business.
Agnès Varda has made as prominent a comeback as any director over the past year, and the BFI Southbank’s summer Vardafest opens with the reissue of Cléo From 5 to 7, the director’s 1961 breakthrough. The tall, striking Corinne Marchand is Cléo, the Parisian singer who pops out for a few hours while awaiting the results of medical tests, only to see reminders of her own mortality everywhere: what we’re watching, essentially, is life - Cléo’s, and everybody else’s - passing before one woman’s eyes, in something like real time.
Cléo now appears a thoroughly modern heroine: a celebrity (a commodity, even) obliged to negotiate the worlds of art and politics in search of the happiness that might relieve the ache at her centre. Both intellectually and geographically curious, the film remains as playful as any other afternoon spent on this director’s shores, albeit with sudden, unexpected swells of emotion: “Sans Toi”, a lament Marchand performs with Michel Legrand at the piano, and the final, bittersweet leavetaking position Varda, once again, at the very heart of the New Wave.
The week’s noisiest return is, of course, Iron Man 2, which adopts Spider-Man 3’s line of insisting that once a superhero has gone public, they deserve the full celebrity treatment, complete with their own theme park, dancing girls and extended entourage, stretching here from Mickey Rourke to Bill O’Reilly. Despite this additional bling, I made practically the same notes during 2008’s original: again, the real marvel is Robert Downey Jr.’s ability to make engaging what most often resembles a two-hour trade fair for the military-industrial complex. Zipping between Russia, Monaco and Manhattan, the sequel moves in the right circles, at optimum blockbuster speed, but that’s all this franchise is doing right now: circling, like a vulture over the world’s popcorn-munchers, or a jet running out of gas.
[A fuller review of Iron Man 2 will appear on this site in due course.]
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