Revanche, Götz Spielmann

A fantastic film noir by Austrian director Gotz Spielmann, Revanche opens with a plot reminiscent of Fargo (1996) and A Simple Plan (1998): a brothel tough guy, Alex (played by Johannes Krisch), robs a bank in order to clear the debts his Ukrainian girlfriend, Tamara (played by Irina Potapenko), owes her pimp.  His simple, "infallible" plan goes wrong when a local village policeman, Robert (played by Andreas Lust), stumbles upon the getaway car.  

Though the film sprinkles several motifs from the other two movies--in particular, the scenes of Alex cutting and splitting firewood invoked the woodchipper in Fargo--it veers away from them with multiple ironic redemptions.  To list them here would reveal too much.  

In addition to the tightly plotted narrative, the film features great montage work and editing.  It merits a second viewing.

Highly recommended.

 

Departures, Yôjirô Takita

Departures is an elegant and small film about the most inelegant of big topics, death.  Daigo (played by Masahiro Motoki) is an unemployed cellist who returns with his young wife to live in his deceased mother's fishing-village home.  Desperate for work, he takes a job casketing, that is the ritual preparation of bodies before they are cremated.  Though lucrative, the job is held in low esteem by Daigo, his wife, and neighbors.  

As we learn from the film, casketing is a new profession, the result of families no longer performing the end-of-life rituals themselves.  Over the course of nearly a dozen casketing ceremonies, we watch as Daigo lends artistic beauty and dignity to the ritual, thereby providing comfort for the grieving families.  He learns not to force the families to keep their distance; he works, instead, to collapse that distance and bring them in physical contact with the corpse.  

Slow and somber--perhaps too slow in spots--the film ends with Daigo achieving his own reconciliation with his father (who had abandoned his wife and son thirty years earlier) when he steps outside the prescribed role of onlooking family member and gently cleanses his father's corpse.

Recommended.