Amer

I don’t mean to boast when I say that usually my choices from Love Film are a success, I don’t know about you, but sometimes I like to experiment with a film that sound interesting that I know very little about. Well this week I came unstuck!

Movie Poster.

The synopsis for Amer (2009) seemed quite promising. It’s a French language “thriller’’ written and directed by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani for their debut feature. The film is divided into three linked segments involving symbolic events in the life of the same main character, Ana, at different ages. In the first we see a very young girl in a large house where her grandfather is at first seen to be dead and then not so! An old shrouded women, performing some very bizarre acts, turns out to be the child’s grandmother. Her parents are seen making love in another room in the house. I have no idea what any of this represents and by this time my wife had left the room completely bored.  In the second segment Ana is know a teenager and we see her wondering around a small village collecting the messages with her mother looking very sultry and alluring but doing very little else. This section represents the awakening of her sexual power over the opposite sex. All very nice to look at and very well shoot but not very exciting.  The final segment finds Ana as an adult women returning to the house featured in the first piece where a razor-wielding maniac stalks her. Lots of extreme close up shoots of gory razor slashing all filmed in an erotic fashion.  This is the best of the three, certainly an interesting watch. It was described in the Time Out review as the shower scene in ‘Psycho’ played over feature length. The film has been described as homage to the film genre that was based on the gialli novels of the 1960’s and 70’s and adapted in to movies by the likes of Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. But unless you favour avant-garde experimental type filmmaking I’d give this one a miss.