According to the film, this consisted of found 8mm footage, which the director then all of a sudden realized told the story of her good friend George. Uhm, I doubt it. Some of the footage was from a moonlanding, do they want us to believe that this Belgian director just all of a sudden was offered home footage from an astronaut? No, this can't have been an accident, this must have been planned out in advance.
I don't have much to say about it, though it was good. Reappropriated 8mm footage can't help but feel like countless indie rock videos such as this one, which does cheapen the experience a bit. That it was still so very good had a lot to do with the amazing voiceover. French is such a great language doing this in, and the voice over artist was so animated as she talked in a highpitched voice about killing all the people from their own homevideos: 'Ratatatatat! Bif, bif! Swoooosh!!' (It's in the trailer) That was in the section 'Quand je serais une psychopathe' There were a bunch of sections like that, as the story became about parallel universes where the speaker became a bunch of things. Some of the sequences were meta about film, as we were told that in one universe the big studios got tired of using actors, and then hired ordinary people to act out their own life, causing some dedicated people to act out their own deaths. The pictures were nicely manipulated. In one universe reverse speech was fit into what the characters were saying. In another, where she became a God, she changed time and all the images ran backwards. In that universe, heroic Nazi's saved 6 million people from the gas chambers.
I have nothing more to say, don't think. This will probably be hard to find, but it was nice to see in an almost full theater. People up here have so amazing taste.
Amour Fou (Jessica Hausner, Austria, 2014)
This was the best 'rectangle-drama' I've seen in a long time. Take a look at those pictures above.Those are two amazingly composed pictures, with many many lines and rectangles. But that first picture, while it's photographed straight on, and the two white lines at each side mirror each other, it's still slightly off kilter. The chairs don't match, and the kid and the painting are out of synch. And that second picture is diagonal, with several planes of color meeting each other. There wasn't a single picture in this film that wasn't exquisite. Even the few shot-reverseshot were good, with one side being straight on and the other diagonal, or with one of the persons sitting in front of a big curtain, meaning that in the reverse shot, half the frame was filled with red cloth. I haven't seen any film by Jessica Hausner before, an Austrian filmmaker who has competed in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, but that seems to be a big mistake. Austrian filmmakers are amazing at rectangle-drama's, actually. Haneke, of course, but he changes it up. Less 'auteurist' filmmakers like Ulrich Seidl (Paradise-trilogy, In the Basement) and Nikolaus Geyrhalter (Abendland) can be even more rectangular. Perhaps we need to speak about Austrian Rectangle Films? If so, then Hausner is seemingly the ruler of that style. Yes, this was that good. I am very very impressed.
The whole trailer looks amazing.
As can be seen, this was a costume-drama. Based on the true story of Prussian romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist and housewife Henriette Vogel, who comitted suicide together in 1811. There really isn't a lot to that story. Heinrich wants to die because he is unhappy, and Henriette becomes diagnosed with a tumor, so she wants to die on her own terms. What makes the story great is the way it becomes entangled with the depiction of time and place. Henriette's husband is working on a tax reform that would liberate the peasants and even force the nobility to pay, which makes his noble friends very unhappy. And frightened, since the spectre of the French Revolution still hangs over the country. We know what will happen, that Prussia will become Germany, will become dictatorship, then two countries, then democracy. They don't. The people navigate in a world they don't know. Henriette's sickness might be a tumor the size of an 'unripe apple' in her lower abdomen, but it might also just be a nervous disorder - and it's probable that the doctors would be able to figure this out if only they, instead of analyzing her urine or doing 'magnetical' therapy, simply touched her abdomen, looking for a lump. But they don't. That is simply not part of what can be done at this time. Just as the tax reform cannot be made without a much bigger bureaucracy. In so many ways this world is nothing like ours, with people honestly talking about how most people shouldn't be given freedom. But the central unknowability, that these people has to act without fully knowing the rules, that feeling is universal through the ages. One of the very best I've seen this year. Bravo.
Also Seen
Three competition films. Homesick and Underdog, from the Dragon Award competition, two films most noteworthy for amazing female performances at the center. And the documentary Every Face Has a Name, telling stories of refugees in 1945 and a bit in 2014, which won the Angelos-prize from the Swedish churches.
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