Amour fou

Tags

Amour fou, Jessica Hausner, Kleist, Schnitzler

Amour fou

Directed by Jessica Hausner

Germany, 2014

Cornerhouse, 15 February 2015

When Heinrich, middling poet and minor aristocrat, proposes a suicide pact, one woman demurs while another is a reluctant taker.  You get the sense that if he’d had two refusals, he would have asked a third woman.

It is an interesting film, loosely following events in the last year of Kleist’s life.  Here he’s a poet who is out of tune with his age, an age of great social change.  (Kleist wrote little or no poetry, as far as I know, and his story The Marquise of O- is here described as a poem.)  Peasants are being given the vote, aristocrats are about to be taxed.  Heinrich is self-absorbed, precious about his feelings.  His mother is cutting his allowance, which threatens his livelihood and his sense of himself.

If Kleist is the presiding figure, one can also detect the influence of Schnitzler’s Dying (a novella written in light of the suicide craze in Vienna following Crown Prince Rudolph’s death); hardly surprising, perhaps, since Hausner is Austrian.  With Schnitzler she shares as well an analytical, almost a forensic interest in human behaviour.  She is a director who would dissect these people if she could, you feel.

Are these people spurred on by mysterious passions?  Not likely, they are automata, puppets in a puppet theatre – which is what one character describes herself as feeling like.  Incidentally, one wonders whether and how Kleist’s essay on the puppet theatre influenced the look of the film and the way the actors approached it.

An anti-romantic film, but one I could easily watch again, with renewed interest.

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Lourdes

Tags

film, French, Jessica Hausner, Lourdes, Sylvie Testud

Lourdes
Directed by Jessica Hausner
Austria & France & Germany, 2009
Cornerhouse, 28 March 2010

One of those films – they are not necessarily French, though often are – where one gets the impression that the director is smarter or wiser or somehow more immune from tragedy than the characters on screen.

  Or feels or thinks that she or he is.  (Jessica Hausner wrote as well as directed Lourdes, incidentally.)

So here is how it goes: we follow a group of pilgrims, accompanied by a priest and nuns and carers, as they make their way to Lourdes to experience that place of miracles.

Some of the pilgrims are disabled and seeking a cure for their ailments – and, Lo, it seems that Christine (played by the excellent Sylvie Testud), a woman paralysed by multiple sclerosis, is suddenly able to walk and move her arms.  By no means is it clear, though, that this improvement will last.

If compelled to describe this film I’d say it was detached, sardonic, coldly observed, sour, gently (or rather slowly) excoriating with regard to human nature.  ‘Why me?’ is a question that each pilgrim asks him/herself and, when it seems as if one of their number has at last been cured, as though by a miracle, the question becomes ‘Why not me?’  Let us be in no doubt, the Grace of God is as mysterious in operation as the national lottery.

All told, a complex film if rather distanced.  But this is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact it is rather to be admired.  Jessica Hausner, the director and writer, has a keen eye above all for people’s resentment and hopes dashed.  She is on the side of those not chosen.  I’d gladly watch Lourdes again, certain that I’d discover new things in it.