502 Revanche

[resonator79]

I just watched the Bluray, and out of curiosity I left the subtitles on. I am Austrian, and I have to say, most of you got it right, the prostitute speaks very broken German, therefor the "broken subtitle" parts were translated into English rather well. Some of the Austrian characters speak in not only an accent but a true and somewhat harsh Austrian-German dialect, and even those parts were translated true to the meaning, which makes me wonder how they did it, they must've had help from an Austrian interpreter with that. I think Criterion did a great job on this disc, and I'm glad they did, it's the only HD version available worldwide (afaik).

[Mathew2468]

Just saw this and nothing was unexpected. The trailer gives away everything but

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the pregnancy which was obviously going to happen when we find out about the cop's impotence. Criterion's phrase "seemingly content wife" was also a bit sledgehammery.

I kept waiting to get past the things I knew were going to happen.

I think the reverse also works - the film does not paint a flattering picture of people who are in a better position, particularly in the form of

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the cop's wife. Her character really makes my blood run cold - notice how when Alex rather rudely tells her to get lost, she suddenly invites him over to the house, without any sense of being fazed. They have sex for the second time - in the nursery! (Better than the marital bed, I suppose, but still!) The way she presents the news of pregnancy to her husband with no sense of guilt or shame, and the way she tells Alex to stay away once his role as sperm donor is over. But the real icing on the cake is when she puts two and two together and realizes that Alex is the robber, and also that her husband is the man whom Alex intends to murder. What does she do - rather than say "Please don't kill him", she says "Please don't tell him what happened" (presumably she's referring to the Grandfather). There's some serious narcissism there.

And the really scary part is that Alex has already taken his revenge (it's just not eye for an eye revenge as he was planning) - it's a matter of if and when the cop discovers the truth of the child's paternity - he will be subject to unimaginable emotional turmoil and trauma and the probable realization that he's married to someone totally ruthless. The cop, as we see, is not a bad man - Spielmann shows his remorse and PTSD well; it's just unfortunate for his character that Alex happened to listen outside at the moment when he was putting on a brave face over the shooting and that Alex then chose to assume that he felt no remorse over what happened.

I was thinking that

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the pregnancy was supposed to be a happy thing (I don't really get it) and she didn't want her husband to find out it wasn't his. I mean she thought she was really doing some good. She wanted to keep Alex's baby and the cop would finally have some confidence in himself and everything will be fine. Of course she should have remembered that Alex said he was going to kill Tamara's killer.

But it was definitely very pretty, and I usually don't find anything pretty.