Three Continental Filmmakers Show Their Gritty Sides With Revanche, Flame and Citron, and Hunger

NEW WORLD ORDER: European filmmakers like Götz Spielmann (Revanche, top) and Ole Christian Madsen (Flame and Citron, bottom) have tapped into a grim, noir sensibility much different from their predecessors’.

Many American moviegoers would no sooner rent a foreign film than they’d drive a Citroen: too effete, too peculiar, not red-blooded enough. But over the past decade or so, that sort of prejudice has become harder and harder to maintain if you’ve been paying attention. Indeed, it’s almost easier to find a gritty Euro film on domestic DVD racks these days than the more stereotypical elliptical musings. A new batch of home-video releases bears that out and presents some of the best films released anywhere in any genre recently.

Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann’s Revanche (Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray) is, on the surface, the kind of contemporary noir that’s been clogging the direct-to-DVD pipeline in America for a couple of decades now. Alex (Johannes Krisch) is an ex-con who works in a Vienna brothel and dates one of the girls, Tamara (Irina Potapenko), on the side. Alex hatches a plan to escape their overbearing boss and get them out from under with just a simple little bank robbery. Of course, nothing is ever simple, and Alex ends up hiding out on his grandfather’s farm, just down the road from the home of Robert (Andreas Lust), the cop who foiled the plan. As Alex plots revenge, he encounters Susanne (Ursula Strauss), Robert’s wife, who gives his grandfather a ride to church each week.

For all the stock characters, massive coincidences, and see-’em-coming turns here, Spielmann makes it surprisingly easy to go with the flow. Indeed, it’s hard not to, given the writer/director’s firm and skillful grip on the story. He takes the time to subtly let Alex and Tamara become more than just types, and once the action shifts to the countryside, he allows each character’s motives and foibles to emerge at their own pace while quietly building some serious tension over what Alex will do next as he splits firewood and wanders the woods by flashlight. Spielmann could have settled for a nasty little revenge flick, but what he ends up with is a nuanced mediation on fate and loss and hate and acceptance. If Paul Haggis’ Crash were half the film Revanche is, it would actually be worthy of the kind of praise people heap on it.

American filmmakers may have access to the action and grit of the Old West and urban gangsters by birthright, but European filmmakers have Europe’s experience during World War II to draw from. Ole Christian Madsen’s Flame and Citron (MPI DVD) tells the story of the titular real-life Danish Resistance members and their grim war of attrition with the Nazis on the streets of Copenhagen. Thure Lindhardt plays Flame, whose red hair flops over a boyish face that has nonetheless become accustomed to peering down pistol sights and putting bullets in collaborators’ heads. Mads Mikklesen (best known here as Craig-era Bond villain Le Chiffre) is Citron, Flame’s wheelman and a reluctant assassin. As in Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic Army of Shadows, the life of a Resistance member is depicted as bleak and cheap under the constant threat of betrayal and death. Unlike Army of Shadows, there are subplots to contend with: Flame’s relationship with a seductive courier (Stine Stengrade, a ringer for Carla Gugino), Citron’s unraveling ties to his put-upon family, and their realization that their Resistance handler may be ordering them to kill the wrong people. A melodrama in comparison to the ice-cold exemplar of Army of Shadows, Flame and Citron is nonetheless an effective and gripping wartime tale.

An entirely different kind of true war story plays out in British artist/filmmaker Steve McQueen’s long-awaited debut Hunger (Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray). The battles before McQueen’s cameras take place behind the walls of Northern Ireland’s Maze prison in 1981, as Irish Republican Army prisoners struggle against Britain and their Protestant guards (exemplified by Stuart Graham) by refusing to wear prison clothes or bathe or use the toilets. For years the IRA men (exemplified by Brian Milligan) have wrapped themselves only in blankets, emptied their leftovers on the floor, funneled their urine into the hallway, and smeared their feces on the cell walls. After a brutal, guard-enacted clean-up, the prisoners take the protest to a new extreme: a hunger strike. In a 17-minute one-take scene, Bobby Sands (Inglourious Basterds’ Michael Fassbender) debates with a priest (Liam Cunningham) over the morality and effectiveness of starving yourself to death in the name of a cause. And then he does it, as McQueen’s cameras watch silently.

Hunger is notable not only for its thoroughgoing brutality, but for its thoroughgoing sympathy. Watching the guards lining up to beat the naked prisoners with truncheons is hard to take, but so is McQueen’s camera catching a young guard weeping in terror. Graham’s character helps administer a forced grooming (complete with bloodletting) to the shaggy Sands, but McQueen also shows him soaking his bruised knuckles and checking under his car for bombs. This is intimate conflict as written on the bodies of the men trapped in it, and McQueen’s patient watchfulness captures it in excruciating, but effective detail. Hunger isn’t easy to take, but it’s impossible to forget.

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