The Belgian premiere in Brussels. The directors acknowledge the fact: Amer is a "trip" as they say. Actually a pointless experimental ego-trip. You can dance on your head or hide yourself behind the few selections the film had in festivals along the year you won't make me believe now that Amer is a good movie. Helen Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the directors, play a very easy game here: they avoid to direct actors (they are all like wax mask scattered with screams from times to times), they avoid dialogs, they avoid any narrative, they avoid the most elementary editing syntax by pouring jump-cuts all over the place (and please don't call it "style" it is not subtle enough for that). They conveniently justify the experiment behind the banner of the Italian genre Giallo but it is far from a Giallo. Amer is at best a collage of cliché inspired by Giallo. But in fact it's just a very unconvincing device which fails to hide the weakness of the direction.
Amer is typically the kind of film which also attempts to avoid critics by standing behind the ever heard: "You just hate the film because you don't understand it." Sure, give me that. A bit too easy. Oh, by the way, I did notice the portrait of Freund in the staircase and the numerous film citations but it takes a little more to make your film an intelligent work.
If one look back to the previous short films of the duo it won't take long to realize that their films didn't evolve much in ten years, And actually Amer is closer to a bad student short film which would have been stretched out into a feature length film. And this is the most painful part of the "trip": as long as it doesn't cost much money the experiment is fine. That's what short films are made for. It's a laboratory. But when it reaches the scale of a feature film it becomes very inappropriate, even shameful, especially those days of economical turbulence. Amer is a nearly 1 million Euros experiment partly based on state funds. "A tight budget" complain the two spoiled children in an interview. But I'm sorry this is serious matter, this is public money. You can't waste it the way Amer does it to the face of the audience. Much higher and better things could have been achieved with that money: a film for instance.
Amer is typically the kind of film which also attempts to avoid critics by standing behind the ever heard: "You just hate the film because you don't understand it." Sure, give me that. A bit too easy. Oh, by the way, I did notice the portrait of Freund in the staircase and the numerous film citations but it takes a little more to make your film an intelligent work.
If one look back to the previous short films of the duo it won't take long to realize that their films didn't evolve much in ten years, And actually Amer is closer to a bad student short film which would have been stretched out into a feature length film. And this is the most painful part of the "trip": as long as it doesn't cost much money the experiment is fine. That's what short films are made for. It's a laboratory. But when it reaches the scale of a feature film it becomes very inappropriate, even shameful, especially those days of economical turbulence. Amer is a nearly 1 million Euros experiment partly based on state funds. "A tight budget" complain the two spoiled children in an interview. But I'm sorry this is serious matter, this is public money. You can't waste it the way Amer does it to the face of the audience. Much higher and better things could have been achieved with that money: a film for instance.