Jessica Hausner is a smart and talented director, less celebrated than other German and Austrian filmmakers, but with a clean style and good ideas.
Amour Fou is the perfect example, a crazy love story without love between a young untalented writer who knows that will never be Goethe and a depressed and annoyed wife in Austria at the beginning of the 19th century. Instead of the period instalment, Amour Fou is a modern story that reminds the social illness of Julianne Moore in Todd Haynes’ Safe and the bourgeois hypocrisy of the late Chabrol and Resnais production.
The sadistic bitterness of Michael Haneke is quite far, just like the taste of grotesque of Ulrich Seidl, but for many reasons, Amour Fou is even more meaningful, because of the sense of the uselessness of the characters merged in a sophisticated and almost creepy pictorial style. They are all shadows, they don’t face events, they just wait for the end to come, always choosing the wrong words, feelings and manners.
Hausner tells a very contemporary story of men and women with no qualities, incapable to face and handle what life really is: choices and compromises. Maybe they’re romantic heroes. But not even for one day.