Amer

Cattet and Forani are a Belgian couple who have made five short films together. This is their first feature. Divided into three parts, it focuses on childhood, adolescence, and womanhood in the life of Ana. Each moment is seen symbolically, very sensually, but without much discernible narrative, in a marvelous display of stylized visuals (in intensely colored and multiple-filtered 35 mm. images). There is a powerful, hit-you-over-the-head soundtrack. The material is fragmented, beginning with the images of eyes, presented in long horizontal rectangles. A girl is browbeaten by parents, or a couple anyway, whom she witnesses through a keyhole, shut in, and comes upon having sex. Later she also contemplates the hardening corpse of her dead grandfather. White grains under a bed. An ant. A spider. Loud booming sounds, which unfortunately in the Museum of Modern Art screening room blended with the underground sound of a rumbling subway line.

Later, the girl grows up and the film, which begins with dark interiors in an old house, switches to a sunny, Mediterranean, outdoor world. We are near Menton (credits indicate later), on the margin between the French and Italian Rivieras, along the Cote d'Azûr or the Amalfi Drive. A gang of motorcyclists with leather and metal and tight jeans stand by the road with their cycles. But we see only bits and pieces of them.

And this goes on and on, never ceasing to be beautiful, lushly noisy, sensual, fragmented, narrative-free. Amer, which means "bitter" in French, may be ideal for those who like to revel in "pure cinema."

There is one trouble though, and that this film tends to turn neurosis -- or desire, whatever it's about, which isn't altogether clear to me -- into a fashion shoot. It's said to mimic the style of Italian "giallo," pulp fiction, or the Daria Argento kind of stuff, and Italian movie music is among the many sonic allusions. Initially the feel is very much like something Spanish, or the Guillermo del Toro of Pan's Labyrinth. But as time goes on the impression of a fashion shoot undercuts the evocation of dream and fantasy through visual means. What might have been edgy, subtle, and memorable turns to chic kitsch. Or slick horror, when someone plays around with a straight razor in a threatening and suggestive manner as in Dali-Buñuel's Andalusion Dog.

While I and others with me found Amer hard going, despite its accomplished visuals, a British online reviewer called Alan Jones (reporting on the London Film4 Frightfest) was entranced, delighted with the evocation of Italian "gialli." He concludes, speaking of the late segment he explains is a walk along the highway to the hairdresser: "Charlotte Eugene-Guibbaud couldn't be more tantalizing as the hair-chewing Lolita either with her mini-dress hem flapping against her knickers at crotch-level. Maria Bos is pure Florinda Bolkan in the eyes-reflected-in-knife-blade finale, the portion where debts to A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN are felt the most. Shimmering with a lush vibrancy and utilizing recycled Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai, Stelvio Cipriani and Adriano Celentano music within its superb sound design, AMER carries an erotic and exotic charge I never thought could be replicated again outside such essential gialli as STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER or the classic Dario Argento Animal Trilogy. AMER is a faultless masterpiece, so just relax and breathe in the heady perfume of Cattet and Forzani's dazzling lady in black."

This glowing report shows the potential Amer has as a festival film that may, since Magnolia has bought it, get theatrical attention. However, in my view Cattet and Forani have not essentially moved up from their five short films to a feature, because this is merely short-film material spread out over ninety minutes, divided into three, and diced up into many edited visual fragments. A series of stylish pastiches does not a feature make. The conception is too slight and too fragmented to work as a real feature film. Nice eye candy though, and as Jones says, the sound design also is definitely "lush."

Shown as part of the New Directors/New Films series co-sponsored this year by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center and sown in New York at both the Walter Reade Theater and MoMA's Titus Theater in April 2010. Amer has been shown at many festivals between September 2009 and spring 2010.

Act 1 is brilliant - a terrifying, sensual, nightmarish homage to Dario Argento. Act 2 is boring filler. Act 3 has a nasty torture scene and is better than the second act, but still feels pointless.

Yeah, I'm really not a fan of these 'style over substance' style movies. I saw this film's follow-up, THE STRANGE COLOUR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS, before I saw this, so I had some idea of what to expect, but still this film's almost entire lack of storyline and coherent narrative was enough to finish me off. I get what the filmmakers are doing, and I'm a huge fan of the giallo genre, but this just smacks of pretentiousness and comes across as completely pointless.

AMER tells the visual story of a girl whose life is chronicled in various parts. She's subjected to a terrifying experience as a child, and then her perfect life as an adult is brought into jeopardy by the intervention of a mysterious stranger. There's no more to it than that; this is an entirely visual production, with thousands of cuts and edits designed to make the most beautiful experience ever.

The images are great, and the soundtrack is hugely evocative, but the whole thing lacks so much substance that it's a real chore to sit through and it seems to go on forever and ever. This is from a guy who's been enjoying the art films of the likes of Werner Herzog and Kim Ki-duk. But AMER is a case of the 'Emperor's new clothes'; the lights are on, and they're very pretty, but nobody's home.

I am a fan of Argento and the influences of this film. To be honest though I found this film to be good for the first section, the rest was dull and weak. The lack of story could be accepted by the art house feel of the film but that's not always an excuse for poor films. If I hadn't been a fan of what are considered superior genre films then maybe yes I would have seen the vision and delivery. To finish, but not reveal this brief review, the last section is shot in daylight dark. There is really bad light filters used which add a cheapness and only add to the already confusing story line. I would suggest a better example of a similar style film would be the Jess Franco film Eugenie. Better still Betty Blue.

The childhood segment that opens this, I felt, was a ten-star movie, a superbly strange horror seen in bewildering fragments through the eyes of a child. What especially makes it is the dreamlike giallo humour, particularly on show in Argento's Inferno, of the character advancing oblivious no matter how nightmarish and Freudianly creepy things become, and no matter how clumsily they themselves behave.

At the end of this part, sadly, as if not quite knowing what to do with the brilliant potential it's found, the film dissolves into abstraction, followed by two rather more mundane sequences from adolescence and adulthood.

There's still a lot to enjoy here. I really like it, especially that, at a time when so much art-house film feels leadenly stuck in numb, muted-colour naturalism, this is utterly wild in its deployment of current film and editing tech. If you're doubting whether movies can really astonish visually after the demise of celluloid, take heart. There are whole new worlds to discover here and Amer, while also owing much to the past, points the way.

Too bad then it applies this sensibility to more and more boringly disorienting strings of extreme close-ups, especially of eyes, and, mixed in the the bravura imagery, some that is really cheap and tacky looking, like student video in which they've tried to dress things up by bleaching it out too much and adding a sepia tint.

It feels like desperate and probably fairly conscious padding, because, unfortunately, there isn't anywhere near enough substance in the later sections to carry the day. Given that the first segment so perfectly captures the strangeness of a child's perception, a huge opportunity seems to me to have been missed to do the same for adolescence and adulthood. The closest we get is an acknowledgement that teenagers are very interested in sex, and, well, duh.