Amnesia

Amnesia

Had he never become a director, Barbet Schroeder would still be an important figure in film. In the early 1960s, he helped start Les Films du Losange with his friend Eric Rohmer, which went on to produce some of the greatest French films of the last half-century. Or all century. All time, maybe. His name as a producer is associated with such masterpieces as Rohmer’s “The Marquise of O,” Fassbinder’s “Chinese Roulette,” Rivette’s “Celine and Julie Go Boating” (in which the dashing Schroeder also appears as an actor) those three alone were made during 1974 and 1976. So yeah, even without his own movies, he’s a hero of mine.

Which I think are pretty heroic, too often underrated. He started by directing “More” in 1969, a vivid fictional portrait of a doomed hippie couple whose dreams of utopia on Ibiza curdle quickly under heroin addiction. Then he kept going bouncing between fiction and documentary; fixating on perverse or overstepping states of being that veered toward if not into the anthropological if not sociological; poking at political horrors that were both intimate (the Iranian Revolution) and distant (the murder rates in Ciudad Juárez). A filmmaker who wanted to show you things you hadn’t seen before but needed to see.

Like when he made a movie about Idi Amin, called “General Idi Amin Dada” (1974), it wasn’t just another distant journalism trick: Yes, Schroeder got close to his subject by offering him the chance to make an “autoportrait,” but also put himself at risk with his subterfuge. And once he arrived in Hollywood? There aren’t many European directors who could claim something like this two-film run: First came “Barfly,” then “Reversal of Fortune” (both 1987). Even his American movies that didn’t work for me such as “Murder by Numbers” (2002) still have a certain undercurrent of danger that gives them intrigue.

To be honest, I don’t know if Schroeder’s ever made a movie in which you’re not supposed to be aware of the danger. But I’m positive he’s never made one in which you’re not supposed to be aware of the trick. It’s why when you watch his best stuff, such as “Terror’s Advocate” (2007) or “The Venerable W.” (2017), two documentaries dealing with terrorists and Buddhist monks, respectively, who pushed their countries to the brink of madness or even something like last year’s “The Valley” it feels as if you’re watching him think through everything right there onscreen. A mind that wide awake is rare. A mind that wide awake and alive is enough to make you believe in movies again.

His new movie is called “Amnesia,” and it takes place mostly in Ibiza, though at first its mood seems placid bordering on contemplative: Marthe Keller enters on a gorgeous sunset limping with a cane; she looks considerably older than her actual age at the time 70 years old. And then we immediately flash back more than a decade. Keller’s character is named Martha, and she’s speaking English to a man who’s speaking German to her, asking her about a property in Germany whose sale she must supervise personally, in person. She won’t hear of it having self-exiled from her country, she now lives on Ibiza, where Schroeder directed his first movie; we’ll soon learn that Nazism forced her to renounce all things German: Not just the language but also German cars and wine.

Nothing about this that’s Martha’s mantra. “What do you expect me to say?” she tells the German DJ who just moved next door to her in Ibiza, as quoted in an interview with Riemelt. “That I spent the last 20 years of my life hating your country?” She’s trying to find ways to keep him at arm’s length: It is revealed early on that Martha lost a boyfriend in the Iraq war, and she clings fiercely to her beliefs (which include thinking of herself as honest). But Jo knows what he wants (“a Daddy Warbucks”) and doesn’t let himself be rejected by anger towards him or anyone else including his mother Corinna Kirchhoff or grandfather Bruno Ganz, both visiting from Germany with their own secrets.

Schroeder told The New York Times that he wrote the screenplay based on his own mother’s life, which might explain why it feels so personal compared with his other films. If anything, though, this makes Amnesia even more thoughtful: a French director making movies about France can seem self-indulgent; here we get something universal and human.

Watch Amnesia For Free On Gomovies.