Nigel P
'Amer' arrests the attention from the word go, with some imposing imagery of little girl Ana's (Cassandra Forêt) place within a frightening house and amongst even more creepy relatives.It is easy to see the similarities between this and Directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's later 'The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears': they are clearly in love with the visuals and there is very little dialogue. Whilst the first of the three 'chapters' is genuinely morbid and creepy – and my personal favourite segment – the second, in which Ana (Charlotte Eugène Guibeaud) encounters adolescence (she could be anything from 14 to 20 years old) focuses on her leap, or slither, from little girl to the object of desire. There are many suggestive shots of various body parts and awkward closeness with others. It doesn't really mean much. In fact, it doesn't mean anything at all, other than it is part of Ana's 'journey'.So then, the third act. Ana is now played by Marie Bos. Suggestion of much light masturbation. Stunning scenery. And a slight return to the intimidating feel of the first segment, with her seemingly returning to her abandoned family home. Despite apparent chance meetings, Ana is very much alone. These moments of her retracing the steps of her childhood remind me of the less than comforting homecoming of Pip, all grown up, returning to Miss Haversham's ruined building after his adventures. Here, the house is baked in sunlight, and any adventures Ana has had are so obscurely filmed and her character so thinly drawn, we can only appreciate the beautifully shot décor, the unmade beds, the flaking wallpaper, the stunning scenery and the ghostly, discarded porcelain dolls. But the sense of unease comes to the fore once again – whatever the shortcomings of the art-house style this film embraces, the protracted ending is a heady mix of the sinister and sensual. There is an antagonist, but we are not even sure if he is real. Does he represent the dark memories that haunt her? One thing is for certain – nothing is certain, especially Ana's eventual fate.
p-t-welsh
As a fan of giallo, surreal and 'arty' films, as a bilingual French speaker and lover of Truffaut, Bunel and Goddard as well as Bava, Argento and Fulci, this should have been my kind of film. But Amer is a 90 minute waste of celluloid. The saving grace is its beautiful locations. My immediate reaction to the opening scenes were that it was filmed in the same villa as 'Hatchet for the Honeymooon'. I've checked this and hatchet was filmed near Rome, whereas Amer was shot (well thrown lazily together whilst drinking absinthe) near Menton. But, good start if it is to be an homage to Giallo. To be fair the first of the 3 segments is an OK student giallo pastiche. It is eerie, confusing and slightly disturbing. This would be fine if it had any narrative link to the rest of the film. The 'middle' section is possibly amongst the worst waste of time I've ever spent in front of a screen.A dreary real-time walk into the village while mummy gets her hair done then chasing a football down a hill to be confronted by the lamest bunch of pseudo bikers (on 50cc mopeds) I've ever seen. Give me strength! The final segment is OK in a confused way and is littered with Argento references most notably from 'Profundo Rosso' and 'Tenebrae'. And then it ended. which was about the best bit.
melvelvit-1
The NY TIMES called AMER "an exercise in giallo (eroticized horror), a richly colorful mosaic of sinister sidelong glances" while the LA TIMES enthused, "a nightmare vision of desire and fear -gorgeous, heady, dazzling!" but these pointed paeans are only partly true. Except for the odd snippet, there's no dialog or musical score in the three vignettes depicting the life of a disturbed young woman (childhood, adolescence, adulthood) and although the last sequence contains elements of the giallo, the film is more of an homage to the indelible images of "maestro of the macabre" Mario Bava.AMER's first segment on a child's reaction to her grandfather's death re-imagines the opening tale in Bava's trilogy I TRE VOLTE DELLA PAURA (aka BLACK SABBATH) from prying a valuable object out of a dead man's hand and the nightmare that follows right down to the dripping water and eerie blue, green, and red light that bathed the terrifying tableaux. The second segment on the girl's dangerous sexual awakening combines Bava's OPERAZIONE PAURA (aka KILL BABY KILL) and it's white soccer ball with the nebulous evil-under-the-sun aura of Tennesse Williams' SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. The third and final scene that sees the young woman revisiting the abandoned villa where she grew up actually does reference BLOOD & BLACK LACE-style gialli with its black gloves, straight razor, and stalking sequence that leads up to a graphic murder. Unfortunately, there's only one (barely set piece) slaying in AMER and this dreamy collage of jump cuts, split screens, and undeniably beautiful imagery is less than the sum of its parts which may prove disappointing to hard-core horror fans. Cineastes -and those who enjoy avant-garde narrative as well as color-drenched kaleidoscopic visuals- should, however, get their money's worth. Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani's offbeat endeavor also reeks of Roman Polanski's REPULSION and I found the "eroticized" exercise admirable but more dull than anything else.
askmonroville
I have to agree with jan_ulalume's review in that this may be avant-guard to those who have never seen such imagery, but to those who have (in essence) grown up on this stuff, it is more akin to a "giallo's best hits". With the "camera looking through the clear lightbulb shot" from SUSPIRIA (along with the colored lights directed onto people and key subject areas), Fulci's preoccupation with eyes and nose bridges, even encompassing Bava and countless other Italian filmographers filmic visual ques (WHO SAW HER DIE's funeral veil POV), like the former reviewer states it becomes over-saturation of style to the point of becoming ridiculous. I will say that the first segment with the little girl is the best, simply due to the fact that there seems to be more of a coherent story that one can follow compared to the other two segments, which focus primarily on visuals alluding to some set of visual metaphors (even Zalman King wouldn't go this far), not to mention that the last segment's "twist" is (regardless of how predictable it may be to those familiar with these things) isn't built up very well at all.Regardless, I would still suggest it (at least the blu-ray, as the clarity may help the viewing experience a bit) at least just to take it in. Maybe with some editing and some more giallo music (as the second and third acts are nearly music-less, which hurts those sections quite a bit for me) the movie could come across better...
AD
