Amer

L'approbation parfaite et la parodie postmoderne du genre cinématographique - cet horreur-giallo est un hommage à Argento et à sa surmonte même essentielle: le film est avant tout intelligent et son aspect formel est raffiné jusqu'à la limite du meilleur savoir-faire formel, vers une pionnier expérimental. Tout le film est pratiquement muet et repose sur la création d'associations de pensées à travers des raccourcis visuels, établissant des "connexions courtes" entre des images autrement contrastées - la mort, le plaisir, les jeunes corps en plein épanouissement sexuel, les corps sans vie ridés; (génial!) la coquetterie de la peau nue avec du caoutchouc synthétique, du métal. En bref: l'inversion constante de la vie et de la mort, de la morbidité et du plaisir, grâce à la frénésie de la caméra et du montage, des détails fétichistes (suppléant le sens du toucher du spectateur) et l'absence réelle de mots et de "l'intrigue", qui nous force à nous fier à nos sens les plus lascifs, la vue et le toucher. Une autre preuve que les films peuvent se raconter principalement par des images! Une autre question est également l'inversion de la victime et du meurtrier, et surtout du meurtrier et du spectateur, engendrant un plaisir cinématographique pervers. (18/06/2015)

Amer was recommended to me by a friend, according to whom I was in for something really unusual. I did get a sense of originality, but it’s a pity that I actually don’t know what or who Amer is, I don’t know what this movie was about and mainly I have no idea what’s the connection between the three parts that this movie consists of. The only link I can see is that this movie is actually no movie at all, but rather a collection of crazy cuts, a couple of original ideas with references to all kinds of things. What I noticed the most was probably the music, which at times reminded me of old French crime movies. Other than that, the first idea of the little girl who can sense everything scary around here was nice, the second part was for pervs and the third part is an homage to giallo movies. I could imagine all three ideas squeezed into an imaginative 15 minutes, which would be about enough for all that originality, but ninety minutes? I don’t know if my initial excitement about this movie was killed by the amount of ideas, or the boredom associated with that… (22/11/2015)

An audiovisual spectacle with a beautiful atmosphere in several horror scenes. If it had a detective script, it would be a perfect Giallo, but what to do when Amer is basically NOTHING experimentally stretched to feature length? When, after thirty minutes, I gave up the hope of a plot with continuity and meaning, the film only bored me until the end, regardless of the occasional surprise about how effective some moments are. But the directors expressed themselves artistically, which has made certain group of viewers rejoice at the non-mainstream approach to the genre. Myself, I felt frustrated at how satisfied I could have been if the ambitions of the creators had been appropriate to the horror genre. But that is my problem, not the creators’. (13/02/2011)