VERDICT: Emmanuel Gras’ aesthetically minded short is an abstract vision that blends planetary movement and physical intimacy, playfully meditating on where exactly we come from.
An object slowly takes shape in the darkness but it is difficult to discern exactly what we’re seeing at the centre of the opening shot of Emmanuel Gras’ Amo. The surface appears to be human skin, but the form is unfamiliar. Here, the body is a landscape as alien as another world, drifting in the void, while the coming together of two bodies carries the import of galactic cataclysm within the ecstasy of sexual union. A bold and tactile work, Amo was part of a special non-competition screening that kicked off the short films programme in this year’s Critics’ Week in Cannes.
Gras and his fellow cinematographers – Fabrice Main and Barbera Visser – achieve their otherworldly effect with playful use of light and motion. As the camera intimately tracks across naked bodies cast in chiaroscuro, shapes seem to emerge and transform before the viewers’ eyes. What in one shot is clearly a person becomes, seconds later, another abstracted environment. As torsos press against one another they merge into a single celestial body. As such, when skin then drifts away from skin, the footage takes on the aura of a chasm creaking opening within the earth.
As the two bodies grow ever more entwined, skin beaded with sweat, the carnal and the extra-terrestrial become inextricable from one other; the heat of passion invokes the conflagration of the universe’s primordial origins. It is perhaps unusual that a filmmaker can conjure a sense of deep time using only camera angles and human bodies, but this is precisely what Gras has managed here, aided no end by an enveloping score by Gaspar Claus and David Chalmin which evokes radioactive static and tantric energy in equal measure. Somehow, Amo manages to be a celebration of physical love and an oblique stare into some kind of ancient cosmic mechanism: a glimpse of the universe knowing itself in the most natural, human way.
Director, screenplay: Emmanuel Gras
Cast: Milagros Michael, Joahn Volmar
Cinematography: Fabrice Main, Emmanuel Gras, Barbera Visser
Producers: Fabrice Main
Editors: Emmanuel Gras, Sylvain Rio
Music: Gaspar Claus, David Chalmin
Production company: Dublin Films (France)
Venue: Le Semaine de la Critique, Cannes (Special Screening)
No dialogue
20 minutes
