Götz Spielmann’s Revanche opens in the seedy Viennese underworld, where Alex (Johannes Krisch) works as a stockboy in a sex club and Tamara (Irina Potapenko) is one of the illegal Russian girls forced to work for the chubby, two-faced pimp Konecny (Hanno Pöschl). Alex and Tamara are also lovers, and for much of the film’s first twenty-five minutes, the couple is naked in Alex’s cheap apartment or Tamara’s hotel room (where she is put up by Konecny). They live a hard, dingy life; Tamara is fifty thousand dollars in debt to Konecny. But it is also a kind of grimy Eden, the two lovers with nothing in the world but each other, dreaming of running off to Spain and partnering with a friend of Alex’s who is opening a seaside café.

When Konecny tries to move the pretty Tamara out of the club and into a position as a full-time call girl for wealthy Viennese politicians and businessmen, Alex decides it is time to take matters into his own hands and robs a bank in his little hometown in the rural outskirts of Vienna. But the robbery goes awry, and Alex and Tamara’s Bonnie and Clyde effort to steal a second life is cut short by the young police officer Robert (Andreas Lust).

Revanche is a smart, psychologically gripping film, which rests on the back of a remarkable performance by Johannes Krisch as Alex. Alex seems like a straight-forward street thug, a low-level thief who is smart enough to understand that the alpha males in the sex- and drug-filled underworld he inhabits are crude and untrustworthy. But for much of the film, we don’t know to trust Alex. Is he is a product this seedy world or just lost within in it?

The lines between good and bad, gentleman and scoundrel are blurred in Spielmann’s thriller. When Alex moves back to his grandfather’s farm, by luck he discovers the police officer and his wife Susanne (Ursula Strauss) live on neighboring land. Susanne is friendly with Alex’s grandfather, and because of this, Alex pinpoints Susanne as a vehicle of his revenge against Robert.

What follows is a tangling of relationships brought together by fate and happenstance. Alex is a simple, stone-faced man, but that does not make him an uninteresting character. On the farm, he broods and broils, spending his days chopping wood and plotting his next move. Yet with each swing of the axe, Krisch engrosses us in Alex’s inner turmoil.

When Alex arrives on the farm, his grandfather says to Susanne that there are two kinds of people who live in the city: scoundrels and fancy high-rollers. Despite his best efforts, Alex turns out to be neither. He is a man lost in a purgatory of his own making, trying to find a way out.

At the Angelika Film Center
www.angelikafilmcenter.com