Amour Fou

The sig­na­ture image of writer/​director Jes­si­ca Haus­ner​’s fact-based, 19^th cen­tu­ry-set Amour Fou is of a woman’s face obscured by a bou­quet of flow­ers – a sug­ges­tive emblem for high soci­ety, of per­fumed sur­faces over­laid on human frailties.

There’s no ques­tion that Hen­ri­ette Vogel (Birte Sch­noeink) looks like a del­i­cate blos­som, and so she attracts the pest-like atten­tion of the writer Hein­rich Kleist (Chris­t­ian Friedel), a capital‑R Roman­tic poet who propo­si­tions this mar­ried young woman with a capital‑R Roman­tic sce­nario: join him in a sui­cide pact and, in doing so, exer­cise a mea­sure of con­trol over their oth­er­wise inex­orably reg­i­ment­ed and pre­dictable lives.

The trick of Amour Fou is that it takes this set-up and treats it as a kind of atten­u­at­ed small‑r roman­tic farce – the fate­ful meet cute between a man with great pow­ers of per­sua­sion and a woman loom­ing for some­thing to fall in thrall to. Henriette’s fas­ci­na­tion with Kleist’s sto­ry ​‘The Mar­quise of O,’ about a cour­te­san who is vio­lat­ed in her sleep by a man she loves, hints at a sub­mis­sive fan­ta­sy that, in one of this wry film’s numer­ous high ironies, does not in fact run counter to the atti­tudes of her coun­try­men; if any­thing, Henriette’s appar­ent yen to be manip­u­lat­ed dou­bles down on her culture’s priv­i­leg­ing of mas­cu­line authority.

Prod­ded by doc­tors, bewitched by hyp­no­tists and only hes­i­tant­ly indulged by her hus­band (Stephan Cross­man), Hen­ri­ette is a frail fig­ure arous­ing con­cern but not a lot of curios­i­ty about they mys­tries of desire.

This is not to say that Amour Fou paints Hein­rich Kleist as a hero­ic lib­er­tine; to the con­trary, he’s played by Friedel as a weasel­ly self-mythol­o­gis­er who is using his new co-con­spir­a­tor as a sound­ing board – a way of con­vinc­ing him­self of his own life phi­los­o­phy. (One of the script’s fun­ni­est and appar­ent­ly authen­tic touch­es is that Hein­rich approach­es sev­er­al women with his soul-mate spiel – he’s a pick-up artist ped­dling death-as-transcendence).

Haus­ner keeps find­ing ways to expose her anti-hero’s basic fee­ble­ness with­out tip­ping the film into an explic­it cri­tique, and while the film’s icy cam­era style and punc­tur­ing of bour­geois mores (and focus on a sui­cide pact) may remind some view­ers of her fel­low Aus­tri­an Michael Haneke, she’s at once gen­tler and fun­nier when it comes to her char­ac­ters – which is not to say that the film is soft.

The cli­max, when it comes, is star­tling not because of what hap­pens (Vogel and Kleist’s fates can be dis­cov­ered eas­i­ly enough) but rather the pre­cise nature of the stag­ing of the cli­max, which takes the under­ly­ing theme of free expres­sion and implodes it in a sin­gle instant. The exact oppo­site of a grace note, it’s a scene which casts the lit­tle bit of the film that comes after­wards in shad­ow – a shade that grows longer and dark­er in the hours and days after the cred­its roll.