Revanche (2008)

Revanche is a film about biding time. The English translation is “revenge”, a rather abrasive title, but here is a film with a bank robbery, a murder and spying, where no one takes revenge. It is a story of intelligent people, not movie characters, and certainly not characters we’ve seen in typical genre pieces.

The inciting incident, that moment in storytelling that sets the plot in motion, takes place maybe 30 minutes into the film. This is the bank robbery and accidental death of the robber’s girlfriend. Before this, we’re introduced to five characters whose simple and jarring lives are fascinating as character studies, and who involve us immediately once the tragedy occurs. Alex is an ex-con working at a strip club. His Ukrainian girlfriend, Tamara, is a stripper and street hooker, and her boss has ambitions of using her to service high-class cliental in an exclusive apartment complex. This happens in Vienna, Austria, and outside in the country a quite police officer, Robert, and his loving wife mean no one any harm. Susanne and Robert suffered a miscarriage, and she frequently visits the house of Hausner, an elderly man looking after his farm. The film is guided by chance, and it is that Hausner is Alex’s grandfather. In an ordinary movie this would be contrived, but in Revanche, where time passes slowly and is filled with detail and the beauty of detail, this character that joins together two families that would otherwise never meet, is part of the meditation on the passing of time.

To save his love from a hellish life, Alex decides he will rob a bank. Tamara insists on staying in the car, even though she cannot drive and will have no part in the robbery. Also, Alex’s gun isn’t loaded. That’s important because Alex isn’t a bad guy. He was in prison for stealing, a crime no doubt but one that violates property and not human life. It is another robbery that leads to Tamara’s death: Alex’s easy getaway is interrupted by Robert, who is held at gunpoint until the cat gets away, and takes two shots at the tires. Tamara is accidentally killed.

The film is well made. That is an understatement. Director Götz Spielmann understands that his daring narrative depends on fleshing out the lives, the personalities, and the habits of his characters. When Alex takes refuge at his Grandfather’s farm, unaware that his too friendly neighbor is married to the man who killed his girlfriend, he chops wood for the old man. We all know either through experience or stories how wood is chopped. But through the course of Alex’s time in the country, hiding out and later planning on killing the cop once he discovers the connection, we examine through the action of the story how firewood is cut. First logs of wood are wheel-barrowed into the large farm with the giant saw. The saw is electrically powered; the logs are placed on a large cot connected to the side of the saw, and all Alex has to do is guide the cot up, and the saw slices the log. Two or three cuts get an entire log.

Then comes the manual labor. Alex chops the small logs into fours, into the firewood that will heat his Grandfather’s house in the winter.

Of course in a movie wood chopping isn’t in itself interesting. The act serves many functions: through Alex’s determination and exertion we know that he’s constantly thinking about Tamara. He watches every time Susanne comes to the farm looking for Grandfather Hausner. When Susanne happens upon Alex, their cold talk suggests a lot about their personalities. That director Spielmann uses the action of wood chopping not exactly as “business” but to express emotion, impotence, and as a visual representation of Alex’s methodical waiting is the mark of a fastidious filmmaker and an acute human observer.

Of course the characters surprise us in ways that are so rewarding. I don’t want to go into detail because the little revelations and nuances build to a rewarding experience and, as a viewer, not knowing how movie characters will react to their circumstances, being unable to predict things even after seeing hundreds of by-the-numbers thrillers, is very rare and so special. I’ll instead focus on the actors. There are great, natural performances from all five leads. Johannes Krisch as Alex and Ursula Strauss as Susanne are especially fascinating, or at least their characters’ relationship was very moving, unexpected, and kind of shitty, but in an understandable way. Krisch isn’t Brad Pitt or George Clooney, possible leads for an American version of this story; Krisch is handsome but ordinary. He has love handles and is losing his hair, and Strauss is attractive but not a debutant. These are real people who could pass unnoticed on the streets. As movie stars there’s nothing remarkable about them, but that is why they’re so effective. Johannes Thanheiser as the Grandfather is also brilliant, stubborn and old and unwilling to leave his farm for his own health. He plays his accordion, serenades a shrine to his dead wife, and goes to church every Sunday. This character is so moving in his tradition, and the film uses him as an anchor for its ideas and atmosphere. He waits, he observes, and so does the film.

The cop character, Robert, is also fascinating. He faces what might be considered a Kieslowskian dilemma: by chance, his being there after the robbery, aiming for a tire and shooting a woman, his remorse and psychological breakdown as a result of his actions, speak volumes about the mentality, fears, and humility of police officers. How do they feel when they shoot someone? Even if it’s a criminal, as human beings it must be ugly to kill a person. Most movie killers don’t care. Guns are fired and it’s as normal as stepping on chewing gum. I don’t want to constantly compare Revanche to other, lesser movies because it’s great on its own, but intelligent movies are so hard to come by these days.

The opening shot, indicative of disturbance—calm water shattered by something being thrown in—is mysterious and almost forgettable as a standard elliptical opening scene until it is answered late in the picture. What is thrown in is a gun, and the reason why is beautiful, so expressive of human understanding, relations, and forgiveness, and in a movie with no music, no shouting, no hysteria, it creates the perfect atmosphere for a film that leaves us with so much to think about.

Revanche (2008)

Director: Gotz Spielmann

Writer: Gotz Spielmann

Stars: Johannes Krisch, Ursula Strauss and Johannes Thanheiser

Austria

In German and Russian

Runtime: 121 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1173745/

Swimming Pool (2003)

François Ozon channels Alfred Hitchcock in his psychological thriller Swimming Pool.  Where Hitchcock only hinted Ozon marches fearlessly ahead in this surprisingly effective, sexually dynamic mystery that is more conventional then it ought to be.  Actors Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier as a would-be mother / daughter team break through the convention with fascinating performances, bringing out the rich nuance in Ozon’s macabre screenplay.

Rampling plays Sarah Morton, acclaimed author of the Inspector Dorwell series.  Sarah retreats to her publisher’s summer home in France to find inspiration for a new, watershed project.  When at first she begins writing the next in her Dorwell series, her tranquil visit is interrupted by Julie, her publisher / lover’s daughter.  Julie is a punk: brash, keeps odd hours, and is inconsiderate of the reserved English author’s peace of mind.  Julie brings different men home and has loud sexual trysts which agitate and seemingly arouse and fascinate Sarah.  The film doesn’t become a murder mystery until ¾ into it, and that section of the film is its weakest, but the set-up to the fatal accident gives us two very opposing rivals, one sexually liberated and one who, in Julie’s words, only writes about dirty things and never does them.  The dirtiest of things, the act which soils most, is done by the less likely of the women.

Ozon is unafraid to show Ludivine Sagnier’s beautiful body.  It’s hard to accept this is the same girl who played the impish Catherine in Ozon’s 8 Women.  I admit I didn’t want to see her naked having adored her in Love Songs.  I’ve associated a certain innocence with her.  Here her breasts are everywhere, and she touches herself more explicitly than a lot of actresses would on screen.  Some of her boy toys’ rear ends are seen, too, and these guys are not really the kind you might want to see naked.  This is something that bothered me about Julie.  She is so beautiful and sexy that you’d think she could attract hotter guys, at least guys her age.  And she probably could, but as we slowly learn this girl must be starving for attention, more so than we might thing even at the film’s climax.  The only nudity that embarrassed me was Rampling’s full frontal shots.  I felt that, while what the character was doing was interesting, it did not grow organically from the script and that Ozon was abusing his actress.  Then I realized that Rampling starred in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter in 1974, and then I understood that she is a fearless performer.

Her relationship with Sagnier’s Julie is really interesting.  Sarah, we sense, is an empty woman.  Her life is lived in her writing.  The only man at home is her invalid father; her lover—her publisher, Julie’s father—keeps big secrets from her, and she doesn’t have children.  I never sensed that Sarah wanted kids, but the twists she takes in her relationship with Julie really allow them to bond as mother and daughter.  I don’t want to give it away, but trust me, they do bond.  It could be that Sarah’s interest in Julie is solely as subject matter for a new book seemingly inspired by the writer’s experiences with the young girl.  In that case Sarah gets too intimately involved in the messes of her characters, but then again it is often said a writer’s characters become like their children.  Sarah’s efforts to protect Julie can be seen as motherly.

I can’t say, though, that I understood the ending.  To be honest, I guessed—and it will be fairly obvious to those familiar with the devices of thriller plots—the twist ending well before the finale, but the way the story unfolds is both unexpected and predictable.  So what does that ending do to Sarah and Julie’s relationship?  I honestly don’t know.  I can make assumptions, or at least explain it to myself, but my explanations alter or destroy the great material of the film, the relationship between Julie and Sarah.  But a twist ending in a thriller is often a letdown.  If the material is excellent, the bad ending can be overlooked, at least by me.  While the ending is not bad, it leaves a lot of questions at too late a point in the experience.  But I didn’t mind, just like I didn’t mind the some of the convention in the later part of the picture.  It is old-fashioned fun but with a sexually explicit twist to murder mysteries.

I’m really starting to like François Ozon’s work.  I’ve seen 4 films, and the first, Under the Sand, was very boring.  It also starred Charlotte Rampling, but it’s the kind of arty flick where the subtly was so subtle that any subtext was altogether lacking.  The other three have been terrific.  Swimming Pool isn’t unique or original, but I was not bored.  There were a few moments where I was nervously inching towards the screen, and if a thriller can do that, it’s won.

Swimming Pool (2003)

Director: Francois Ozon

Writers: Francois Ozon and Emmanuele Bernheim

Stars: Charlotte Rampling, Charles Dance and Ludivine Sagnier

France / UK

In English and French

Runtime: 102 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0324133/

Rear Window (1954)

I noticed a great migration heading towards the theater.  As I took my seat I recognized a few people from the train.  Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo was playing before the feature, and there was a lot of talk about film and specifically about Hitchcock.  The lights came down and Rear Window started.  This is one of the most romantic experiences I’ve ever had at the movies.  We were all here to see the master’s work.

On the surface, Rear Window is a movie about someone looking outside of his window.  Jimmy Stewart plays Jeff, a photographer temporarily bound to a wheelchair.  He has a fabulous view of the apartments across the way and each window is, if you will, a movie screen.  Each screen is a different show.  His would-be girlfriend Lisa grows impatient as Jeff refuses to settle down, alluding to his “characters” for examples of why not to marry.  He soon comes to suspect that a man has done away with his wife.  He tries to convince everyone in his life, Lisa, his nurse Stella, and his friend, Detective Doyle, but Jeff is the only one with the knowledge of all the strange comings and goings of Mr. Thorwald across the way and the unexplainable disappearance of the man’s wife.  People simply refuse to believe that someone would commit murder in plain sight.

Hitchcock’s films are almost always art.  All are entertaining, but his skill elevates many of his pictures into another realm.  Rear Window’s central theme is looking, not just Jeff looking but we the audience watching the film are exposed to the way that the cinema looks objectively and subjectively into its own world.  Hitchcock’s editing style throughout his career was simple.  Using only three separate shots, the man could display, purely pictorially, the psychological process of his characters.  “The look” is an objective shot, a shot from no particular point of view.  This shot orients the audience, and is the image of the character looking, in this case Jeff looking out his window.  “The POV—what is seen” follows, and this shot is the character’s point of view.  With Hitchcock, these shots always align to the eyesight of the character in the previous shot.  A lesser director would take the POV from an objective angle but in the language of cinema this shot has to be subjective.  Hitch knows to put us into the perspective of his characters, making us implicit in the story.  “The reaction” is a follow-up on the first shot.  Having seen whatever, the character reacts.  It seems simple, almost preposterous, but this three shot technique encompasses what I refer to as the psychology of the cinema.  We know how characters see things, and their reactions tell the story.

Hitchcock was not the great innovator of this technique.  It was apparently set forth by the Russian film theorist and director Lev Kuleshov.  As described by Hitchcock, you take a shot of a man looking, then cut to a shot of a baby.  Now cut to a shot of the man smiling.  What is he?  He’s a kind hearted figure.  Now, take the middle piece of film out and replace it with a shot of a woman in a bikini—keep the same shots of the man.  Now what is he?  A pervert.  Kuleshov went darker, suggesting the image of a dead baby, still with the man looking and smiling.  He now becomes a sadist.  This idea is unique to cinema.  No other art form can encompass the human thought process so clearly and artfully.  It is proof that movies can be art.  This technique is why Rear Window remains one of Hitchcock’s most important films.  It is the clearest, most definable example of his artistic technique.

The director is almost cheating because the set-up of Rear Window—Jeff confined to a wheelchair looking out his rear window—leaves little directorial options for a master filmmaker.  Even when bricks between window panes block our view, we use our imagination to fill in the gaps.  A less talented director would have used an omniscient point of view.  Throughout the film, it is Kuleshov's technique that builds suspense and generates so much of our understanding of these characters.

Hitchcock breaks his own editing rules several times throughout the picture.  Some breaks are logical to create suspense.  Jeff beings suspecting Thornwald at night, and he keeps watch as long as he can but falls asleep around 6am.  We are now given a piece of info unknown to the main character: Thornwald leaves his apartment with, for all intents and purposes, his wife.  When later Jeff accuses Thornwald of murder we somewhat doubt him.  The next time Hitchcock takes us out of sync is after a neighbor’s dog is murdered.  By now Jeff, Lisa, and Jeff’s nurse Stella believe Thornwald has done something wrong.  While everyone is paying attention to the dog’s owner’s impassioned speech about neighborly relations, Hitchcock shows us Thornwald in his darkened apartment coldly, almost erotically, enjoying a cigarette.  It’s arguable if Jeff saw this or not.  I don’t think he did because the last we saw of Jeff he was looking at the grieving woman.  Hitchcock makes numerous curious decisions in this scene.  We see the characters of the various apartments from angles not possible in Jeff’s.  We see close-ups, high and low angle shots, perspectives previously unavailable to us.  I was jarred.  Having become accustomed to the rhythm of editing in Rear Window, I was taken aback by these unusual images.  I don’t know why Hitchcock chose this.  If I had to guess he needed different kinds of shots to carry over the neighbor’s dialogue.  But we even see Jeff and Lisa inside his apartment from a viewpoint across the way.  Their shots had all been objective, and this particular shot felt like someone was looking into them.  We can forgive Hitchcock who is like the Shakespeare of cinema.  His reasons need not be known to us; they are studied and revered.

I realize I’m not critiquing the film.  When talking Hitchcock I have a tendency to speak more formally, often in the third person, and discuss his technique more as a scholar.  I have a long relationship with Hitchcock.  Even before graduating college I had seen all of his movies several times each, and even took a class called Hitchcock and American Experience, examining Hitchcock’s view of American life via his films.  I’ve written extensively about him, and now find it difficult, being so familiar, to give an honest reaction to how I feel about a particular Hitchcock picture.  I find myself, like many movie snobs, praising even bad Hitchcock films, though there are only a few.  Most of his silent films are unbearably slow and horribly conceived, being adapted from talky stage plays.  To Catch a Thief is boring and incomprehensible (though I should watch it again before being so definitive), and regarding Rear Window, I’ve always preferred Hitchcock’s previous film, Dial M for Murder.  Both are cinematically and atmospherically confined in a stage-like way and feature terrific roles for Grace Kelly.  Truth be told I’ve not cared as much for Rear Window as I did seeing a 35mm print with an audience.  Perhaps it was the romantic movie experience, or the energy of an audience watching a taut suspense film filled with humor that allowed me to loosen up.  Regardless I saw a perfect movie.

With each successive viewing I’ve noticed faults towards the middle of the picture.  I always felt the scenes with Detective Doyle were distracting and stopped the movie dead.  Today I realized Hitchcock’s and screenwriter John Michael Hayes’ reason for a detective character.  The story is allowed to continue with ease.  With his character known to the audience, Jeff doesn’t constantly need to be calling the cops to explain the plot.  We get it once and the detective becomes a witness to many things, and adds a bit of humor and puts, by his doubts, Jeff and Lisa closer together.

In fact, the real story of Rear Window is not whether or not Thornwald killed his wife but if Lisa and Jeff will marry.  I really focused on this romantic tug-of-war more so than on any of my previous viewings.  Jimmy Stewart and Kelly are fantastic, but Hitchcock always got terrific performances, and Stewart did his best work for Hitch.  So did Kelly, and she was Hitchcock’s definitive leading lady, though I prefer Ingrid Bergman and Kim Novak.  Their relationship is unique among classic Hollywood films because there is real bickering and disappointment in their conversations.  They get mad and react realistically.  Whenever Lisa makes a move, like bringing a warm dinner from New York’s popular 21 restaurant, Jeff bitterly comments that everything is too perfect.  A rugged photographer, Jeff can’t be tied to a classy fashionista.  Lisa, for her part, can only prove Jeff right by her disgust at the thoughts of not bathing and eating raw foods.  It is their interest in Thornwald (Jeff’s being genuine, Lisa’s possibly encouraged for Jeff’s affections) that begins to change the tone of their relationship.  When Lisa returns to Jeff after breaking into the Thornwalds’ apartment, he gives her such a serine look of love; it is one of the most effective images of love in movie history.  The more adventurous Lisa is, the more Jeff is allocated the dominated figure in the relationship.

It’s interesting to note that each of the windows Jeff watches concerns a different stage of marriage.  Let’s begin with two lone figures, the frustrated Composer and the lonely Miss Lonelyhearts.  They represent Jeff and Lisa respectively.  The Newlyweds represent the impulse for many to marry, at least during the 1950s: the sex!  The Newlyweds draw the shades and make love for several days.  This is the euphoric stage of marriage.  The couple that sleeps outside on the terrace to escape the heat has come to a physical and emotional impasse.  The Thornwalds despise each other.  Obviously.  These two stages are blurred, but concern the disillusionment of the idea of marriage and the resentment that follows begin trapped by your spouse.  It’s quite sadistic of Hitchcock to paint perhaps the grimmest picture of marriage in film history.  The next “phase” as seen from outside Jeff’s window is murder.

Logically not all marriages end in murder, but not all marriages end happily ever after.  While Miss Lonelyhearts and the Composer find each other and love, the Newlyweds now fight over money.

In the end Jeff and Lisa come to a compromise.  They are together, and Lisa is reading up on the Himalayas, a sign she is becoming more adventurous.  But not quite; as Jeff sleeps Lisa picks up her trusty fashion magazine.  This relationship is doomed.

P.S. Thelma Ritter cannot be over praised.  She always brought something to the films she co-starred in.  In Rear Window she isn’t relegated to comic relief, though she is funny.  Ritter’s persona had always been a street wise woman with a sharp tongue and honest insight.  Her character Stella offers all this.  Ritter always gives an easy performance.  Even in lesser films like The Mating Season, in which she stars, she is excellent.  Under Hitchcock’s hands she is allowed to be great in a great film, and though often not talked about in connection to Rear Window she adds to it something extra and steals every scene.

Rear Window (1954)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writer: John Michael Hayes

Stars: James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and Wendell Corey

USA

In English

Runtime: 112 minutes

To purchase Rear Window on DVD, visit Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Window-Universal-Legacy-James-Stewart/dp/B001CC7PPI/ref=sr_1_2?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1302237980&sr=1-2

If you want the best DVD collection of Hitchcock films, get Universal's 14 film Masterpiece Collection:

http://www.amazon.com/Alfred-Hitchcock-Masterpiece-Collection/dp/B000A1INJE/ref=sr_1_9?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1302237980&sr=1-9

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047396/