Revanche Criterion Blu-Ray review

The blu-ray is excllent. the film is great for the first thirty minutes but then goes totally South into a totally contrived plot and increasingly derivative formal structure (stationary camera and longer takes). It's as if it starts shouting this is a European art film, but you get to feel good in this one! Feel good movies always make me feel worse. And Revanche left me feeling sick. This film is perhaps at the opposite end of Michael Hanenke's Cache, White Ribbon, and Funny Games (both versions). Oesterich macht sauber! To be fair, there's no ethnic cleansing in this film. But there is a lot of bad faith. We start off with two working stiff in the sex trade trying to escape from the bad pimp, but the "redemption" of the "illegal immigrants" (a younger prostitute from the Ukraine and an older pimp's assistant, from somewhere in in rural Austria) comes at the expense of the women--how predictable (one is shot dead and the other's a housewife whore). Lots of gorgeous shots in the film, but the composition and editing are so unoriginal that they just flush this film down the drain even faster. Another weird Criterion choice.