Amer

OFFICIAL SELECTION – NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS – MOMA/FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER
OFFICIAL SELECTION – SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST (SXSW)

The title is the French word for “bitter” but this provocative and sensational debut is anything but. An oneiric, eroticized homage to 1970s Italian giallo horror movies reimagined as an avant-garde trance film, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s pastiche tour de force plays out a delirious, enigmatic, almost wordless death-dance of fear and desire. Its three movements, each in a different style, correspond to the childhood, adolescence, and adulthood of its female protagonist—and that’s all you need to know. Drawing its stylized, hyperbolic gestures from the playbooks of Bava, Leone, Argento, and De Palma and taking them into a realm of near-abstraction, Amer has genre in the blood. Its bold wide-screen compositions, super-focused sound, emphatic music (lifted from original giallo soundtracks), and razor-sharp cuts make for an outrageous and intoxicating cinematic head-trip. – New Directors/New Films

“Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s nearly wordless “Amer” is an exercise in “giallo” (eroticized horror) that focuses on the same female protagonist viewed at three different ages: childhood, adolescence and womanhood. At every age she is acutely aware of being observed, first by her grandmother (and in her fearful imagination by the corpse of her grandfather), and later by men whose predatory gaze she subtly courts as an adolescent, but as a woman grows to fear. A dense, churning soundtrack intensifies the heavy-breathing atmosphere of this richly colorful mosaic of sinister sidelong glances.”
- Stephen Holden, The New York Times

“A nightmare vision of desire and fear. Gorgeous, heady, dazzling!”
- Mark Olsen, The Los Angeles Times