It has taken some time to follow up Lourdes (2009) but Jessica Hausner shows that she has no intention of changing tact or style in another deathly-slow drama based on the final days of German writer Heinrich von Kleist.
Berlin at the turn of the 19th century is a city of social and political reforms and the plain-talking poet Heinrich (Friedel) has been caught up in Werther Fever – a wave of suicides that followed the publication of von Goethe's paean to unrequited love The Sorrows Of Young Werther (think Morrissey but with a more macabre follow through). He longs to find someone to die with and sets his sights on Henriette (Schoeink), a married mother of one who, after encountering this sensitive oddity, suffers a swift deterioration in health that baffle the local doctors...
Like Lourdes, Amour Fou is of the Haneke school of austerity. It's deliberately stiff, lifeless, rigid, staid. The most energetic movements belong to the pianist's fingers. The meticulously-framed and symmetrical shots divide and isolate the characters, who speak with little connection to the words they say. Emotions are dealt with a business-like efficiency. Hausner's eye, forever cold and distant, moves the camera only once, zooming ever so slightly in during the one exchange that approaches genuine love.
But there is humour to be found. Obviously, the title is a knowing gag and the kind of wit that Hausner unexpectedly dots the running time with. Most of the smirks lie with Heinrich's navel-gazer and his exasperating self-regard and self-importance. He woos Henriette into his murder-suicide pact but ditches her later when he learns she's only doing this because she's terminally ill, not because she loves him. With all the revelling in self-inflicted drama, this times feels like a distant cousin to Heathers.
But there's more going on yet. The mute maid might distractingly pop up in scenes but the reason for her constant presence slowly reveals itself: while her noble masters have time and money to sit around discussing tax reforms, the freeing of the peasants, and can obsess about love, death and the universe, she cleans tables, turns pages, and generally gets on with things - her simple actions mocking their intellectualising.
A simple yet complex film, the icy tone and the glacial pace requires patience.
