Film Review: The American (Director: Anton Corbijn)

An empty, snow covered landscape somewhere in Sweden. Aan and a woman having sex in a house in the middle of this nowhere. The camera moves in and out, one moment being the coupl's ally, the next watching them froum outside, through the trees, like a spy. Something is wrong, these opening images say, there is a subtle sense of threat, something will happen any minute. And it does. The man is attacked, he shoots the sniper and then kills the woman, the sole witness. The man stays alone, a lonesome hunter, on his own, hunted and hunting, a stoic survivor.

A tremendous opening that sets the tone for the next one and a half hours. George Clooney is a modern day Alain Delon, a coo, emotionless professional whose world unravels when love, that relentless and unforgiving attacker, hits him unexpected.

Anton Corbijn, the acclaimed photographer and vieo clip director coming off his remarkable debut Control, creates memorable images. The Italy to which Clooney's character escaples, is drenched in a pale, almost colourless light, a bare, almost desertlike countryside, narrow, shadowy and nearly always empty streets, a melancholy labyrinth, a metaphor for the emptiness of the protagonists's life.

And Clooney does a good job, too, losing his balance between the professional facade, the willing suppression of everything human and the re-emergence of something hidden, something locked away yet breaking through against the protagonist's will.

So where and how does this all go wrong? Whereas Corbijn was still in his comfort zone in his debut, depicting the world of pop music he knows so well, he's in unfamiliar territory here. nd indeed, he never manages to get the stoty off the ground. Clooney is left alone, he never gets a life or a story to go with his inner conflict. The people he comes up against are badly worked out cliches. The flawed but wise priest, the mysterious woman who hides nothing, the loving prostitute he falls in love with. One-dimensional character and painfully obvious dialogues belie the sophisticated imagery, the subtle acting, the fragile atmosphere.

There is no rhythm. Where Corbijn should have just dropped hints, he plays out every scene, showing what might have been left to the viewer's imagination. Corbijn is a great photographer, a wonderful creator of atmosphere, but as a storyteller he fails here. So what might have been a great homage to those lonely, existentialist heroes of the Nouvelle Vague, remains a rather empty shell, a beautiful facade that contains next to nothing.