Amer (2009)

Amer has been billed as a kind of modern day giallo, reviving a genre that some would say has seen better days, while others would say ceased to exist after the late-eighties. While Amer does draw extensively upon giallology, it is certainly not the giallo for the twenty-first century people have either been proclaiming or hoping it to be. Instead it feels like a giallo made my quackademics who teach gender studies. The whole film is supposed to be some analysis about the male gaze, and rape culture, and the eternal suffering of women at the hands of a patriarchal oppressor. Now, of course, this theme is an important one, but it is treated here with a self-conscious indulgence that becomes quite contradictory. (For better films that look at similar topics, check out The Price of Liberty and Love Conquers All.) Amer both condemns and revels in the often misogynistic tropes found in giallo classics, but the filmmakers have no interest in reconciling these opposing elements. One really has to wonder if they even really know their own subject very well, because the handling of the material plays out like an undergrad thesis. The second segment of the film is perhaps the most mind-boggingly absurd, featuring constant close-ups of the heroine's budding mammary units, and a gang of bikers barely able to restrain their lust. And it is assembled in a very deliberate (see. painfully slow), and obnoxiously stylized manner. None of the manic energy or creative virtuosity seen in the best of giallo is present here. It feels dead. Probably because it is dead. We are only given the vaguest outlines of plot or character, and then things just happen. There is a trend among contemporary "arthouse" cinema to excise as much of the narrative structure as one can without fully abandoning it, but not for any experimental or artistically invigorating reason, but rather to compensate for a lack of concrete ideas, or more vainly, to make the filmmakers appear "smart" and "profound". Skip this and watch a real giallo.