Amour Fou

The mysteries of love rarely get more enigmatic than in Amour Fou, the fascinatingly freeze-dried dark comedy from Austrian writer-director Jessica Hausner. A reimagining of the events that led to the suicide pact between 19th century German poet Heinrich von Kleist and his lover Henriette Vogel, the movie probably won’t please history buffs. (The filmmaker takes some liberties with the actual events.) But as an immersive portrait of repression, depression and the stifling air of privilege, it’s a stubbornly beautiful curio.
Amour Fou takes place in the months leading up to Heinrich’s death, as the ineffectual poet (Christian Friedel) spends time in Berlin asking potential paramours an odd question: “Would you like to die with me?” Unspeakably unhappy and seeing little point in going on—despite gaining recognition for his novel The Marquise of O—Heinrich is ready to end it all, but he yearns to kill himself beside a woman who loves him, as if to prove that amour is stronger than death. Not surprisingly, Heinrich’s proposal elicits no takers.
But then he meets Henriette (Birte Schnöink), a society wife who’s been married for 12 years to Friedrich Louis Vogel (Stephan Grossmann), with whom she’s had a daughter. Impressed with Heinrich’s novel, she’s somewhat drawn to the man, but when he suggests a suicide pact, she’s not interested—until she learns that she has a fatal illness and not much longer to live.
Hausner’s last film, 2009’s gloriously opaque Lourdes, concerned a young woman with little religious faith suffering from multiple sclerosis who travels to the titular Catholic pilgrimage site, inexplicably getting cured in the process. If that movie, with its poker-faced tone, was a wry examination of faith, Amour Fou is similarly dubious yet enraptured by the notion of soul mates. As portrayed by Friedel and Schnöink, Heinrich and Henriette aren’t ever really romantically linked—it’s more that they share a certain sensibility that separates them from those in their orbit.
But Amour Fou isn’t an unrequited-love tale like The Age of Innocence or one of the Merchant-Ivory productions. Shot by Hausner’s longtime cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, the film is a collection of flat, static compositions with no soundtrack. (The camera almost never moves, and the only music we here comes from a piano Henriette owns.) Consequently, Amour Fou’s scenes play out like a series of paintings, the intentionally stiff performances complementing the lack of energy in the framing.