CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

Unlimitedia Sick Product of a Sick System

Noutions Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Finfrosk86 Saw this movie at Frightfest Glasgow.And let me just start by saying oh my good god and holy ghost and mother mary, this is so fantastically boring.Yeah, yeah, before you get your sweats in a wrinkle, I get that it is supposed to be "art", and blah-blah. But that doesn't mean it has to be boring.There is close to no horror here, it is absolutely not a horror movie. There is one scene that is actually pretty creepy, but that's it.No more. No more horror for you! Get out!Really. It is a lot of, uhm, silence, and, I don't even know what to call it. Just, super mellow. People looking through key-holes(?), scarfs blowing in the wind. I don't know. I feel a little douchy, because I'm sure the people who made this are nice hardworking people and I doubt they would call this horror. It should definitely not be shown at a horror movie festival. No, no, no.It should be shown at a can-you-stay-awake-though-this-festival.During the whole movie I hoped for the horror to start. In every scene (feels like about 14 hours long) you wait for something to happen, then no. Just a new scene with nothing cool. I was so happy when this movie was over. That's not what you want from a movie!

bartkl-1 Fluctuating between abstract eroticism and surreal, paranoid mysticism, this film certainly is weird. Surprisingly enough though, it becomes less vague while pertaining the surreal style. As the film progresses, it seems so that the entire bizarre nature of the film is the reality of Ana, who's not just a weird little girl, but actually turns out to be a disturbed mentally ill person, like a autistic paranoid schizophrenic.She is extremely sensory/perceptive and also sensual in a more erotic and carnal way, as is shown beautifully using closeups of lips, eyes, legs, etcetera. Not to forget the extreme intensity of light now and then, and to accentuate the sensory aspect also the use of primary colors, filing an entire shot. The visual style is very creative, and feels really authentic to me. It's minimal and focusing: everything serves to demonstrate the reality of Ana.All the mystic amulet stuff in the beginning, which invites you to try to make sense of it all, turns out to be the little girl's condition using her imagination to make up this reality. There's no mysterious amulet, neither is her grandma trying to hurt her. It's all in her mind, she's very paranoid and frightened. Possibly the shocking discovery of her parents making love while she ran in for help contributed to her weird seductive attitude and carnal desires at adolescent age. She is clearly sick and feels abstract, sexual attraction to the soccer playing youngster, but also with the older motorcyclists.Then she's slightly older, returning to her parental home. She takes a bath, and almost gets drowned by a pair of gloved hands that seem to be the same as those of her grandmother in the beginning. Later when she's trying to sleep, the taxi driver pays her a visit. His intentions are never exactly clear, but he's visiting her at night with a knife, so he's certainly up to no good. However, there seems to be a third person at work, once again the person with the gloved hands. It is in these scenes that I learned that it's actually Ana herself. This becomes even more obvious when she cuts up the taxi driver and takes of the gloves.Ultimately this virtual person chases her again and seems to kill her, which means of course she's committed suicide. One question remains for me though: why does she open her eyes at the end of the film? Personally, I think it's a bad choice that wants to suggests it's unclear whether the final scene is an actual autopsy of her apparent suicide, or another of Ana's delusions. I might be wrong though. It's unclear and I think she should have had her eyes closed ;-).

fedor8 No story, no point, no script. Please, viewer, fill in the blanks yourself, and then feel as if you're smart. (Absurdist cinema as a confidence builder – the con-job that has healed many.) Why have an actual plot? That's so old-fashioned, so passé. It's so much more "artistically valid" to throw in a few loosely related - or even better, totally unrelated - scenes together and then hope that there are enough suckers out there to mistake your laziness for genius. It certainly worked for Godard and a host of other cinema la-la-land charlatans."Amer" is a girl of few words. But then again, so is the movie which is dedicated to her rather confusing life. There are perhaps a dozen lines of dialogue in the entire thing. Note that I said "thing" and not "movie". Just because "Amer" runs for 90 minutes doesn't necessarily make it a movie. But that's debatable, I admit.The thing/"movie"/whatever starts off with a little girl who lives with her parents and her zombie/dead/undead/barely-living/perhaps-living grandparents in a large mansion near the French coast. One would think the fresh air and beautiful vista of the French Riviera would lift the spirits of the population of French people that have amassed there, but that's not entirely or at least not always the case. There is an air of doom and gloom about (as is fitting for a dull flick aiming to be "artistic"). The living are constantly peeved except when they're having sex in upright position (the girl's mother), and the dead/undead are even worse: they are harassing little girls (she's alive, at least for now).The girl, Amer, plays a game of hide-and-seek with her zombie grandma who may or may not be a flesh-eating demon. It's tough to tell, because grandma certainly acts like a hell's minion, chasing her poor granddaughter throughout the house, trying to snatch some sort of amulet or something from her. The same amulet that Amer hijacked from her dead?/undead?/zombie grandpa while he was lying asleep?/dead?/undead? in his bed. To cut a 29-minute non-story short, the girl Amer escapes the clutches of evil Granma and makes it all the way to puberty, which is where the second part of the movie takes us. Yes, at hour 0:29 we are finally spared the continued shenanigans of the living dead (coz it does get a little tedious after about 5 minutes) and their 29-minute long game of hide-and-seek. Not exactly a cinematic experience to tell your (dead/undead/not-yet-born/unborn) grand-kids about.Part 2. Cut to the girl some years later. I can't quite tell how old she is, strangely enough. At first she appears to be around 20, but after a 12-to-14 year-old boy attempts to kiss her pouty French lips, I start thinking that perhaps Amer 2 is meant to be in her puberty, around 15 or even less. Oh, well, who the hell knows. At least she doesn't meet a 55 year-old bald man and falls in love with him, which is the premise of 35% of all French dramas and comedies. This segment doesn't last long. Soon we are to enter Amer 3. Ehem, I meant, we're to enter Part 3 with Amer 3.Part 3. At around 35 Amer is pretty much into masturbating all the time. This is a French movie, after all, so obviously she's going to be obsessed with sex 24/7. She does it during taxi rides while sticking her head out the car window, and she does it in her bathtub. In the bathroom, an unknown assailant tries to drown her. It's a half-hearted attempt because Amer 3 manages to save herself simply by unplugging the water in the tub. Not exactly a master-killer this one. Or perhaps he was just teasing. Who knows. It's a French art-film, we are not supposed to understand anything, so just the fact that I can tell you that someone was trying to kill her is a phenomenal success in itself, meaning I actually managed to understand SOMEthing here.Some time later, the taxi driver approaches the house. He must have come for sex. Someone bars the exit of the mansion so the taxi driver draw out his knife (don't all cab drivers carry knives while on their sex-related rendezes-vouzes?) But before long he is being cut to pieces by the mysterious assailant. Hmm. Was it Amer 3 herself? We are meant to think that, but then she is attacked too (perhaps ANOTHER assailant? anything is possible in a silly flick like this; after all we had a retired old zombie couple chasing around a young girl). The movie ends with Amer 3 stiff in a mortuary. Dead. Braindead. Just like the movie.If you haven't seen this goofy little French bundle of pointless pretentiousness then you might think I'm joking. But I'm not. This really is the basic outline of "Amer 1-3", so if you enjoy absurd, lazily written, meaningless "art horror" flicks about sex, mutilation and the "coming of age" (ha ha), then rent this out or download it from a torrent. Have a ball. Just don't get upset if you start yawning, because this is "art", after all.

chaos-rampant When I included Amer in a short list of films I was eagerly anticipating in 2010, I wrote that I was looking forward to "ostentatious cameras that go on a discovery of psychosexual nightmares, a stylish violence, jazzy grooves". I'm a big fan of Italian genre cinema, especially gialli, for me they fulfill the needs comic-books do in others. When I say I'm a fan, I mean that when Stelvio Cipriani's song La Polizia Ha Le Mani Legate (originally part of Cipriani's score for Roma Violenta) finished playing in Amer's end credits, I rummaged through my cd collection to find it.But, even as I was writing that a few months ago, Amer already had a reputation as more than a giallo film, "arthouse" people insisted, which intrigued me more. So, does Amer reward the giallo fan with the wink of film reference, or is the giallo only the trope of an expression intended for a different audience? To go back to my appreciation for the giallo as comic book, it's the mentality of the colorful panel that appeals to me, the vivid bits of casual violence to strike a chord and be forgotten after the next page, the indulgence on something that reaches only as deep as the excitement it provides. To put so much effort or go through all the trouble for the pleasure of something momentary, this exaggeration is essentially the province of youth, where the fling of a few days burns with the passion of true love. In this sense, the giallo rejuvenates me.That in mind, Amer is at once an apotheosis and a keelhaul of the panel, an overkill of shots capturing small details, of closeups of eyes or reflections or bits of the human anatomy. It's a world come alive through the senses, by a child overhearing conversations from behind closed doors, or a young girl feeling the first tingling of a booming sexuality in her skin. There's very little dialogue and this appeals to me, because the convoluted plots were always my least favorite aspect of the giallo.But if Amer is not pushed forward by people talking, does it establish other means of communicating this story of sexual awakening and repression, the schism that follows from a child discovering a cruel world or a teenager being denied that discovery on her own? I'll say yes, but with reservations. Still, what's important for me, is the tweaking of the filmed image to see is there another way to make cinema, the nature of an experiment whose results can only be appreciated in the future. Better said, if we peel a cabbage we get the core, but if we peel an onion? Some will say we get nothing, but we've done the peeling and we've transformed the onion, so can we really say that? The cinema of Amer is that peeling.Two things particularly stand out for me here in this cinematic depiction of trauma.One is the root of it, seen through the kaleidoscope of a child's awestruck imagination. A child's feverish nightmare shot in the otherworldly cyans and magentas of Mario Bava, where disfigured old men and strange hooded figures reach out to the camera. This is probably the most horrific part of the movie.The other is the cause and effect of the teenage girl's sexual awakening. The directors explore this with a marvellous sense of exaggeration, of a complete fetishization of sexuality and the human body. When the young girl comes across a group of bikers, we get blurry closeups of chrome, of throats undulating or the trickle of perspiration, of buckles and boots. The girl approaches them almost solemnly, clinging to her short summer dress, with an air of fearful apprehension and the irrepressible instinct of a moth drawn to a flame. Before her discovery can be consumated, her overbearing mother shows up to slap her for the offense and take her away. Simple, crude some may say, but brilliant in getting a point across.It's in the film's conclusion that we find the giallo lurking in the shadows of a ruined mansion, where the black-gloved hand of the killer slashes the dark. The directors give us the killing hand but with a twist, another contraption of the giallo.What about the intended audience though? I feel that Amer will appeal more to fans of the sexual psychodrama of Repulsion, than the fan who will seek out a film like Amuck for the profound pleasure of watching giallo queens Barbara Bouchet and Rosalba Neri make out on the same bed. The lurid tradition of Sergio Martino is only honored in the selection of epochal musis by the likes of Bruno Nicolai, Morricone or Cipriani.