Alaska Employment Law

In Revanche, a gritty little Austrian movie (with subtitles) that was nominated for an Academy Award last year in the foreign language film category, Alex lugs crates of beer and watches over the prostitutes in a Viennese brothel, including a young Ukrainian woman named Tamara.  Alex and Tamara are lovers and have a secret relationship.  When Konecny, the owner of the brothel - a brothel named “Cinderella” - decides to turn Tamara into a higher-class call girl, Alex and Tamara make a plan to flee the business.  Over his lover’s objection, Alex concludes that the best way to fund their escape is by robbing the village bank.  When the couple encounters Robert, a local cop, the bank robbery goes wrong, in a very unexpected way.

Alex has a cranky, elderly grandfather named Hausner who has a small farm - a few cows, some apple trees - outside Vienna, and that’s where he goes.  A local neighbor, Susanne, childless and not happy about that, has the habit of visiting Hausner now and then to make sure he’s doing okay.  She sometimes encourages the old man to find his dusty accordion and play a few tunes.

Meanwhile, Alex manifests (and no doubt works through) his own darker issues by relentlessly sawing and chopping wood for his grandfather, who grudgingly comes to appreciate Alex’s work ethic in a way he had not done before.  A shaky trust starts to grow between them.  One day Alex realizes that Susanne is married to Robert, the policeman, and he coldly tells her he can look after Hausner without any help.  Her response is the second big surprise of this story, and leads to the “revenge” in the title.  Things sometimes work out, says this film, even when they can’t possibly work out.

There are two very different moods in Revanche:  the earlier scenes in Cinderella and at Alex’s apartment, hard by train tracks in the city, are gray and dark and feature much nudity; the scenes at Hausner’s bleak but pleasanter farm are somehow informed by the saw and the axe that Alex constantly wields, as he reduces his grandfather’s woodpile to clean, split logs.

I thought this was a terrific little movie, perhaps just a bit long at two hours, but definitely worth your time.