Amer (limited)
| release date | October 29 2010 |
| studio | Olive Films |
| director | Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani |
| writer | Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani |
| starring | Bianca Maria D`Amato, Marie Bos, Charlotte Eugène Guibeaud, Cassandra Forêt |
| site | amer-film.com |
| trailer 1 | Trailer #1 |
3 Comments
“Amer”, one of my personal most anticipated movies of this year, is an interesting and fantastic-looking but sadly also a flawed and overambitious avantgarde/arthouse-tribute to the Giallo-genre of the 60s/70s.
The look of the movie is just stunning: breathtaking camera work, breathtaking editing, fantastic colours, beautiful settings and loads of surreal/sensual scenes and shots. The works of Argento, Bava and the early Fulci come to mind, as well as several films from Avati and Martino.
There’s also an excellent Morricone-like soundtrack, an interesting cast and a surprisingly very well working lack of dialogue.
However, I totally don’t like that the movie’s separated “The Signal”-like into 3 different parts that don’t really fit together:
Segment 1 – incredibly suspenseful, scary and terrifiying, including lots of haunting images, fantastic eye candies and great jump-scares.
Segment 2 – a dull and tedious episode about growing-up that feels like an artsy soft-sex-film with way too many visual gimmicks. Extremely disappointing.
Segment 3 – back to horror with eerie shots, loads of atmosphere and one magnificent-looking kill, unfortunately far behind the genius of the first segment.
Expectations not fulfilled, still it’s great to see that there are people who try to revive the Giallo-style. Maybe there’s more to come…
This movie was amazing. Totally engrossing and gorgeously filmed. I had such high hopes before seeing this movie, and my expectations were exceeded afterwards. Incredibly well done, and highly recommended.
A film shot mostly in extreme close-up, a tribute to Italian “giallo,” a scintillating erotic thriller with a psychedelic palette, the 2009 Belgian/French co-production AMER is an almost wordless fable concerning a certain Ana who lives in a rambling hilltop villa on the French riviera. Her story is tri-partite, and in each of the three sections, she is a different age and portrayed by different actresses.
The first, Ana as a child, is mostly horror as the protagonist wanders the mansion at night, trying to avoid a black-veiled grotesque house servant, Graziella, more frightening because she is never clearly seen. In the course of stealing a watch from the corpse of her dead grandfather, Ana seems to be in constant danger for her life, as she seeks to elude the grasping witch-like figure, while occasionally stumbling upon her mom engaged in various erotic dalliances.
The second part, filmed in daylight, has the adolescent Ana wandering off from her mom on a trip to town, and this section is clearly intent on highlighting the teenager’s sexual awakening. The wind teases and lifts her short skirt and a wisp of her own hair always finds its way provocatively into the corner of her mouth. When she encounters a gang of bikers on the edge of town… the erotic tension reaches high altitude.
The last and most disturbing sequence has Ana returning to the now abandoned and run-down mansion, and on the public transport and then taxi ride up the coastal road, the montages present mostly a dream imagery of sexual threat and desire. Left alone behind the locked gate of the crumbling mansion, Ana’s fevered dreams of desire and death, turn frighteningly real as the brutish taxi driver returns, knife in hand, to stalk the alluring woman. But wait, there’s another hulking figure in the shadows and a straight edged razor glistens in a gloved hand.
A film that some might find maddening was, to me, gloriously cinematic. The eye feasts here, and the mind becomes a player, as montage, color, and sound swirl in a kaleidoscope of suggestive imagery. There’s not a keyhole here that doesn’t have an eye peering through it from the other side. No shutter or door hangs loose that doesn’t thump ominously in the wind, and even the plants in the garden seem to reach, clutch and tear at one’s clothing. One senses that Ana’s wanderings are the downward spiral of a self-destructive fantasy and that nothing will end well… except for fans of the macabre.