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Until mon Amer there's always been a weird dissonance, a grinding disagreement, between the iconography of experimental film and narrative film, even in Europe, where art doesn't have to be framed and velvet roped the way it does here. A mirror to this twin dissonance might be found between the Jungian anima and the Mulveyan male gaze, between Jess Franco's 1967 Succubus, let's say, and Lucretia Martel's The Headless Woman. But Amer brings to this twin dissonance (experimental vs. narrative / male fantasies about what girls dream vs. female artist's impressions of girls dreaming about men) a twin serpent DNA lover's frequency that harmonizes all those dissonant tones, and the resulting unified field harmony that expands wider and wider until it envelops and entrains other dissonances, widening its wave arc until even the most ideal sympathetic response to the film is swamped like a beach house in a tidal wave
forward into an outright anxiety / panic attack as the construct of self within your mind shatters like a glass goblin.The heavy stand body falls to the museum's dirty marble floor in Florence
but back at home watching your shards merely fall off the couch
and you swim
deep
deep down
a fella named Blue Boy delivers a
candy colored poke in the outcast cowboy mouth
burning constantly at stake
But what mouth?
what is the difference between faking not having amnesia
and just not having it but secretly pretending to (secret as in denying you don't know what's going on?)
Amer really can disintegrate the distance between the viewer's mind and the screen, can obliterate the last border between them all, and keep moving outward and outward in concentric razor swipes around the silver lip of the singing bowl if you've seen enough European erotic fairy tale horror films from the 60s-70s and read enough Freud and Jung. Only then you can experience the exquisite anxiety of passing out in a Florentine art museum from the safety of your own home.
It can do this because it's written and directed by a couple - Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani - and that is the harmonizing, entraining factor. "It’s because we are a couple that we can work together,"the couple noted in a 2010 desktop interview. "It would have been impossible to make the film with someone else. We trust in each other and we can speak honestly about intimate things. That’s why we can collaborate." Of course you can, you beautiful bitches!
Many have tried and a few have come close to this kind of alternating current: Debra Hill and John Carpenter came as close as anyone with Halloween (1978) but every film has to get up from the table and go pick a bathroom sooner or later, and Halloween eventually chooses the Men's, emerging with a trench coat and revolver and le bang bang. None have made it all the way -- made it past the border of gender, and the split subject, past nationality, temper and even age. Amer isn't male gaze or the female gaze; but both gazes sliced up in long celluloid pupil un chien andalou Laura Mars strips arranged in close-up as one breathing weird thing, as slick and enjoyable as any modern movie but deeply entrenched in the experimental and certain to confuse or irritate anyone expecting a conventional narrative. Amer doesn't get up to go to the bathroom, the bathroom goes to Amer.
This male and female directing team were, I thought by their names and styles, French and Italian, but they are both Belgian, which makes me realize I don't know anything much about Belgium aside from the awesome frites and that Germany snuck around the Maginot Line through it. But now I want to retire there, and lay on the street having seizures as I stare up at the sky and whisper, Amer. Though their names--unless they've changed them--represent Italian males and French femaleness which makes sense because there are certainly strains of Catherine Breillat as well as Argento, Antonioni as well as Claire Denis.
Their male-female creative interaction is like a game of chess: move, countermove and so nothing is ever clear or unclear. Everything resists a concrete interpretation but beguiles: it doesn't charge ahead like a boy with an uzi and a hardon or merely masturbate with a crucifix like a performance art feminist. Yet if you don't run away in disgust, if you don't dismiss it all as girly stuff or misogynist or artsy and just ride with it, but remain alert and enthralled and ideally high on lack of sleep and Jung and art and Robitussin, then there it is, in its sublime perfection, the mind--both halves--inner and outer, conscious ego and unconscious animus beckoning you into itself, the unconscious's language signifiers reshuffled, the normal narrative progression cracked open like a nut, the inside goodness free falling in slow motion and for a moment you and the unconscious and the images onscreen are all one - the barrier of screen and speaker between you has evaporated.
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When dealing with the giallo genre in the scope of female fairy tale icongraphy it's importaant to stress that the collective as well as personal unconscious does not recognize the border between life and death, between the alive and dead version of you, the ego/soul/body/consciousness. The fear in the unconscious is never just death, it's a fear of violation, the knife, the castrating phallus, the razor in the hand of the man chasing you is never just a phallus, penetration anxiety or even fear of death. It's a fear of dissolving, a loss of self, the split - you are afraid to turn around and face the demon chasing you in your nightmare for a very good reason - once you turn around and face it the demon will merge with the 'you' who is running, both will cease to exist and a new life will begin.
The first such split occurs during childhood - the Freudian key that unlocks Bluebeard's secret dead bride storage, and does early Bava's Black Sabbath, Suspiria, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Brothers Grimm, and Valerie and her Week of Wonders. The second turns sunny and erotic with the girl on the cusp of sexual maturity--Rohmer, Betty Blue, Emmanuelle, Fellini, Antonioni, and Chabrol. The third and final turns to the dark again, to full-on Argento, later Bava plus Blood and Black Lace, Soavi, Fulci.. but with the jittery bipolar modern 'twang' of Antonioni's Red Desert, the eternal dance of metatexual refraction never ends.
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The only way to describe what's going on is to give these kids a name, so I'm calling them the Darionioni Nuovo, a group of filmmakers who have melded the experimental and deeply psychoanalytical styles and substances of Argento and Antonioni into a modern new vision for cinema, one geared towards not just the moviegoer's eyeball but their pupil, not just their ear but their ossicles. (This isn't their official title as a group and I'm not even sure they know each other or ever will but they should have a group name so I made one up). This is a zone that we usually don't trust 'new' filmmakers with, especially not in America where everything has to be laid out with big yellow lines and breasts and 2.3 children and token minorities and police and moral lessons and zeitgeist-dictated products placed according to rating and market. But in Europe and places where socialized education and less hysterical reactions towards sex and cigarettes lets the youth get super intellectual for free here they are, in three films reachable via Netflix, Berberian Sound Studio, Only God Forgives, and Amer but mainly or totally in this instance, Amer. Maybe they can't be appreciated, or even endured, without familiarity with the 60s-70s European horror film canon, but if you haven't experienced any of it, then fuck you, NYU film snob poseur. Nick Ray WAS cinema, Argen t o y Antonioni esta, compli? Cahier of the Notebook! Double Posinegatron. Yeh-yeh boi!
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Now when a guy, a bro, a dude tries to make a female coming of age story, no matter artsy or 'feminist' she comes, it's still a male fantasy, in the end, am I right guys? And that's a shame, because on the one hand we're not allowed to get turned on by the Blue is the Warmest Color because it's still the leering male gaze, and on the other we can't enjoy Chris Lilley's HBO show Private School Girl because our anima gets jealous. And when a woman makes a coming of age film she either lets her animus, "her master's voice" lure her into a phallus-sacrificial circle in the forest, ala Thirteen, or projects said voice clear out of the room with the cricket bat-like swipe of a musketeer's sword (Breillat's Bluebeard). Amer rolls the length of the blade and into the 'win a free game' hole at the end.
When this happens/happening/happened, the unconscious anima/animus wakes up, as mine did with Amer, the result is that you, or the egoic conscious male side of you (if you're me) is utterly and completely bewitched, enthralled. The lights come in corners of your mental house that have been dark for years! You forgot the lights were even there, forgot the corners were even there. Machines start whirring and you don't even know what they do or where they came from. People are applauding you, Nina, you didn't even know you were onstage. Who are those people? You've moved from being just another American whining for his climax to a European calmly engaging the sensual. Now, Nina, Now, Now you really are the Black Swan. Wait, this film was first by a year. That's a little suspicious in some trick velvet light choker box snap shut behind you and all is clear in the hot second before it's lost. Thank inky deep down blackness of your pupils, Nina! Let me see them! The lion sleeps tonight with the immortal porpoise.