I was lucky enough to see Amer at the Glasgow Film Festival yesterday.
I have to admit that from the publicity I expected a straightforward homage to the 70s horror films and thrillers by Dario Argento, but what I got was both much more challenging and interesting than a mere genre exercise or homage.
Amer is just as indebted to surreal dream films like Meshes or the Afternoon, Un Chien Andalou, Lost Highway and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders as it is to 70s Italian Gialli. The thing that always intrigues me the most about 70s European exploitation cinema are the surreal imagery and the moments of avant-garde poetry that are nestled within the haphazard thriller plots. This distils 70s European Giallo and horror films to their avant-garde essence, disposing of clunky police procedurals, performances undone by poor dubbing and frequently questionable attitudes to sexuality and women and it puts the Giallo films frequently ravishing imagery and sound in service of a dream film about a woman's sexuality becoming twisted (amer = French for "bitter") over a lifetime by repression and thwarted desire. It gets the look, sound and atmosphere of those films absolutely spot on.
Despite Amer's almost non-narrative nature, this is a much more faithful and thoughtful homage to 70s Grindhouse films than the Tarantino/Rodriguez venture, which never really got the look right or got under the skin of its sources the way this film does. There are so many clever moments here. I particularly liked the heroine ageing a decade via an ant from Un Chien Andalou, a character who only appears as a silhouette and whose presence is always accompanied by the sound of crackling leather (in reference to the typical Giallo killers leather gloves) and the sheer joy generated by sudden bursts of vintage soundtracks by the likes of Stelvio Cipriani.
I have to admit that from the publicity I expected a straightforward homage to the 70s horror films and thrillers by Dario Argento, but what I got was both much more challenging and interesting than a mere genre exercise or homage.
Amer is just as indebted to surreal dream films like Meshes or the Afternoon, Un Chien Andalou, Lost Highway and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders as it is to 70s Italian Gialli. The thing that always intrigues me the most about 70s European exploitation cinema are the surreal imagery and the moments of avant-garde poetry that are nestled within the haphazard thriller plots. This distils 70s European Giallo and horror films to their avant-garde essence, disposing of clunky police procedurals, performances undone by poor dubbing and frequently questionable attitudes to sexuality and women and it puts the Giallo films frequently ravishing imagery and sound in service of a dream film about a woman's sexuality becoming twisted (amer = French for "bitter") over a lifetime by repression and thwarted desire. It gets the look, sound and atmosphere of those films absolutely spot on.
Despite Amer's almost non-narrative nature, this is a much more faithful and thoughtful homage to 70s Grindhouse films than the Tarantino/Rodriguez venture, which never really got the look right or got under the skin of its sources the way this film does. There are so many clever moments here. I particularly liked the heroine ageing a decade via an ant from Un Chien Andalou, a character who only appears as a silhouette and whose presence is always accompanied by the sound of crackling leather (in reference to the typical Giallo killers leather gloves) and the sheer joy generated by sudden bursts of vintage soundtracks by the likes of Stelvio Cipriani.