Jessica Housner’s films have a remarkable ability to avoid easy categorisation. Often challenging, yet simultaneously low-key, the Austrian director seems to take particular relish in stretching her audience – and critics. If AMOUR FOU, Housner’s latest picture, was to be put in a Netflix category it would read something like ‘Melancholic, irony-inflected, suicide-pact period dramas.’ The sum content of the sub-heading would be one – AMOUR FOU.
Housner’s sixth feature film follows the earnest Henriette (Birte Shnoeink), wife to a government bureaucrat in late 18th century Berlin. Bored but satisfied, Henriette listens to to her boring but satisfying husband explain tax reforms … again … and again. Taking pleasure in the safety of her limited spheres, she is not in the least displeased, holding most of what women of that period could hope for – that is, at least, until Heinrich (Christian Friedel) appears. Heinrich is the 18th century equivalent of the adolescent emo. Writing brilliant, melancholic and very self-absorbed poetry, all the young gentryman longs for is an aristocratic young lady to love him enough to commit suicide with him, and escape the weariness of existence together. Sound far-fetched? Well, most of the young ladies think so too. But as Henriette discovers she may have a fatal tumour, the idea becomes increasingly attractive.
Off-key silence is Housner’s calling card; and whether it be the pause between a particularly stilted dinner conversation, or the eerie emptiness of lonely afternoons in the house, AMOUR FOU exacerbates the audience’s restlessness to new heights. You can’t help but contort in your seat as Henriette and her husband Friedrich converse (and that is a generous description) in their (of course) separate beds. The atmosphere is compounded by the film’s almost inescapable obsession with interiors. Intricately drab wallpaper is added to intricately drab furnishing, enveloping the screen as designed by a sadistic Wes Anderson – and if that wasn’t enough, there’s the occasional bit of framing by some patterned curtains. The environment is so stifling that Friedrich’s prescription of ‘a trip to the countryside’ could as much be for the audience as his ailing wife.
The atmosphere is compounded by the film’s almost inescapable obsession with interiors.
The infrequent trips to outside also serve a thematic purpose. It is parks, meadows and woods that are the environment for Henriette and Heinrich’s fatalistic conferences, the supposed release from dreary existence mirroring the release from dreary interiors. As their covenant progresses the pair move deeper and deeper into the wilderness, eventually reaching the snowy mountain woods in the films climax. Freedom, and its accompanying pain, are also central to the stuffy bureaucrats dinnertime pleasantries. Release from serfdom means an accompanying tax. Is it really better for the common folk to have to bear the strain of poverty just to avoid a feudal lordship? AMOUR FOU provides few answers, instead exploring emancipations affect both personally and socially.
As with all Housner films, any description one tries to place on the drama inevitably proves inadequate. For all its stifling intensity, there is also alleviating irony, the flip-flopping of the central pairs’ convictions providing the odd moment of comedy – yet also bringing the tragic hammer blow of the films’ final moments. If one hasn’t come across Housner’s work – LOURDES, HOTEL or LOVELY RITA – this isn’t a bad place to start – a strong demonstration of her distinctive style.
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