Toward the end of Amour Fou, Austrian writer-director Jessica Hausner (Lourdes) imagines the final meeting between Heinrich von Kleist (Christian Friedel)—the gifted but tormented Prussian writer who achieved lasting literary fame only after committing suicide in 1811, at age 34—and his cousin Marie (Sandra Hüller), whom he’d asked on several occasions to join him in death. Marie is clearly fond of her cousin, even enamored with his genius, but she’s unwilling to take his death wish seriously. Speaking in a warm, matronly tone, she says, “I agree that life is meaningless and that people are cruel, but do you need to let it bother you so much?” This line, like so many others in the film, registers as darkly comic: these socialites are so well behaved that not even an invitation to suicide ruffles their feathers.
Given this cultural climate, it comes as no surprise when, later in the story, the eccentric, impassioned Kleist announces that he can’t find a theater to produce his most recent play (The Prince of Homburg, later considered a masterpiece of German Romanticism) and that without a patron he lives in near poverty. Today Kleist would probably be diagnosed as depressive; he was plagued by feelings of worthlessness and despair, and he spent much of his time alone, often fantasizing about suicide. Yet Hausner reminds us that, no matter how miserable Kleist may have felt, he never regarded himself as a piece of property—his feelings of worthlessness weren’t enforced by law, as they were for most of his female contemporaries.
Directed by Jessica Hausner
