Amer (2010)

Written and directed by Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani
Featuring Marie Bos, Delphine Brual, Harry Cleven, Bianca Maria D'Amato, Cassandra Forêt, Charlotte Eugène Guibeaud, Bernard Marbaix, Jean-Michel Vovk

Supposedly told in three segments, Amer is a giallo-inspired story of young Ana’s sexual and sensual growth from girl to woman. At least that’s what the directors are saying.

Surrealist and extremely hard to follow (or to invest in emotionally), Amer is openly an ode to the films of Dario Argento and Mario Bava, but decidedly leaves out something that both directors usually had a plot. Depicting a series of actresses as the confused and confusing Ana as she grows from girlhood to the prime of womanhood, Amer attempts heavy handedly to repulse and excite without creating any drama or narrative. That kind of thing can work, but it doesn’t work here. Frankly, I’m a little baffled at how this film is categorized as ‘horror’ (using the same criteria, we could say Gone with the Wind is 'horror' because it has that grisly battlefield scene) but it is receiving quite a lot of acclaim from European film festivals as a stunning masterwork of erotic giallo.

And it does look quite stunning. Set primarily on a small cliffside mansion overlooking the ocean and smooth stretches of beach and cobblestone walkways, Amer is a beautiful-looking movie. The ‘Argento’ nods come from the excessive use of red and blue lighting of which he is so fond in films like Suspiria; the Bava influence really only seems to show in a stray fragment here and there, and never for more than few seconds at a time. The first segment begins with some promising dark and eerie imagery combined with family strife and a dementedly old housekeeper who seeks to protect (or hurt?) young Ana from the corpse of her recently deceased grandfather, which has been laid out in his room. After the initial set up, however, the plot takes a downturn and we spend at least half an hour following young Ana wandering around her own house as red and blue lights shine on impossibly behind her. What was frightening becomes boring as we realize there is not only a tiny narrative – there’s no narrative. And there’s no dialogue either, save for a few moments of Ana’s mother yelling at her.

As soon as we process the death and loss and dark interior of Ana’s home, we are thrust into Ana’s emergence from adolescence as a teenager. In the bright daylight of a European summer day, Ana and her mother take an excruciatingly long walk into the nearly deserted town to buy bread or wine or goat cheese, or whatever the hell it is European people eat. This walk takes them past several different types of perverted males – elderly grandfather perverts, 11-year-old-boy-perverts trying to cop a feel, and cool biker-guy perverts who all ogle Ana and her mother. Whether Ana is enjoying the attention or is disturbed by it we don’t know because the actress and the storyline give us nothing to work with. We do know that we are supposed to find Ana attractive, and that is hard to do when we don’t know anything about her or what her thoughts become when facing the looming, smoldering temptation of male attention.

Then you get switched to the last agonizing segment, in which Ana is fully grown and is returning to her ancestral home alone. Between masturbating and walking around, slowly, she is maybe stalked by someone lurking in her home. Or maybe not. You don’t really know. Nothing makes sense, and nothing is clear.

I realize that surrealist filmmaking very seldom does provide any cohesive narrative or dialogue, but in a case where the filmmakers are attempting to conjure imagery form their favorite, ‘narrative’, giallo films, they did themselves, and giallos, a great disservice by not providing one in Amer. No matter how interesting, cool-looking, weird, or innovative a surrealist film may be, an audience can’t get involved or connect if the story doesn’t make any sense. Clearly there was no attempt at story in any way shape or form, and that’s tragic. With a gorgeous location, devoted actors, and a sense of style, to ignore one of the major components necessary for basic enjoyment of a movie is unfathomable.

Amer is a very weird, interesting-looking short film that doesn’t make sense stretched out over the runtime of a feature length film. If that sounds like fun to you, you must be a continental European, pretentious, or just plain stupid. Sadly, I don’t believe that Ana herself ever gets the chance to become a fully materialized, fully sexualized creature because of this shortcoming. She is only ever allowed to see bits and pieces of herself, and so are we, so she never becomes real and we, the audience, and possibly Ana herself, just don’t care very much when she may ultimately be killed by a lurking stranger.

It literally pained me mentally to watch Amer in entirety, and I would not willingly do so again. If I’m in the minority of horror and giallo fans, so be it, but this film belongs in the ‘experimental’ section of a University Master’s Thesis library; not in the hands of a film distributor.

Rating: (2 out of 5):