2008
With: Johannes Krisch and Irina Potapenko
Spielmann's beautiful film would've fit very nicely in my "top 20" of the 2000's list. It's that good. It feels like two films in one. In the first, Krish is a small-time crook working in a Vienna brothel who makes the mistake of falling for a Ukrainian prostitute. In the second, he lodges in his aging grandfather's cottage; his life having been thrown into upheaval by an accidental death. A loner, by day he chops firewood and by night he paces his room in anger and frustration.
It's quite a coincidental tale of love, loss, and revenge. The beginning, which is defined by love or something approximating it, is peopled with various urban dwellers: pimps, prostitutes, johns, and crooks. The climax comes in the crime, where the bad deed is punished by loss. Needless loss. A loss that stokes the fires of revenge, creating three new perspective victims.
He finds himself in the pastoral sparsity of his need for revenge. Where once there was a future, there is but a void. A void that cannot be filled by whatever memories may be conjured from a single photograph. Because that's all he has. A photo of her.
The cop who killed her also carries her photo. Krisch's loss is also his. So it is that their lives swirl round and round in an existential vacuum, but only one can benefit from the death of the other. After a moment of revelation, he is implored by the most seemingly innocent of seductresses, the cop's wife, to not pursue vengeance. Though she knows he is without faith, she beseeches him in a dignified manner that exhibits vulnerability, but doesn't overstate it with pathos.
Because, as we all know, revenge has its many faces.
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