Amour fou



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In turn despairing and droll, this partly fictionalized and highly austere biopic depicts the final months in the life of revered German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist (Christian Friedel) and Henriette Vogel (Birte Schnöink), the ailing housewife he convinced to join him in a suicide pact. In its own extremely particular way, the film amuses as Heinrich roams aristocratic drawing rooms and dryly inquires of various women, "Would you care to die with me?," but it is also in touch with Henriette's sense of domestic isolation and the doomed absurdity of Heinrich as he tries to reconcile reality with his vision of artistic and romantic purity. There is an interesting-if-academic debate on the story's periphery regarding Germany's adoption of socioeconomic concepts from post-revolution France in the early 19th century, and the film is gorgeous to behold with its so-precise-as-to-be-mathematical tableaux.

B+