Amour
Directed and written by Michael Haneke
Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert
sonyclassics.com/amour | |
| Michael Haneke, Emmanuelle Riva, Jean-Louis Trintignant on the set of Amour |
Throughout his career—from his
first feature, 1989’s The Seventh
Continent, about a family’s methodical preparation for suicide, to his most
recent, 2009’s The White Ribbon,
about a small German town that leads to fascism—no one has ever accused Michael
Haneke of sentimentality. In his latest film, Amour—an intermittently
powerful exploration of the reality of death—an elderly Parisian couple deals with
the wife’s incapacitating stroke, and it’s no surprise to note that Haneke’s
film is as far from the sappiness of On
Golden Pond as possible. At least until the end.
As in his other films, Haneke
dispassionately records narrative events as they unfold (his ace
cinematographer is Darius Khondji): a concert that former music teachers Georges
(Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) attend begins the film after
a disorienting prologue that telegraphs the ending—well, sort of. Haneke shoots
the majority of his film from a medium or long-shot distance, and such visual
detachment is broken in startling ways in
Amour. As Haneke cuts to close-ups of Georges and Anne, he brings the
intimacy of their love and pain much closer after she starts spiraling
downhill.
As a director, Haneke is masterly;
as a writer, rather less so. His films are usually predicated on “shocking” displays
of inhumanity, but his scripts are usually blunt and obvious, often mitigating
their visceral power. However, in Amour—which
was seemingly designed by the director to prove that he can treat a humane
situation as devastatingly as his best films about inhumanity, like 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance or
Cache—what begins as an intelligent
examination of dealing with the finality of death is transformed into a
quasi-mystical drama about avoiding dealing with the finality of death.
This is first hinted at in the
bizarre dream Georges has one night, then is really hammered home in two symbolic
appearances by a pigeon in the couple’s beautifully appointed Parisian
apartment, the second of which leads directly into an ending that comes as a
crashing copout by a director who has lost his nerve: despite being telegraphed
in the opening shots, the actual ending is a soft pillow rather than the hard
ground hinted at early on.
Despite such cynicism, Amour remains a forceful character study,
and that’s due mainly to persuasive acting by two French acting icons who
between them have totaled over a century of onscreen brilliance. Jean-Louis
Trintignant (who made his mark with Bridgitte Bardot in Roger Vadim’s 1959 And God
Created Woman) is touchingly vulnerable as a husband not entirely comfortable
with emotions, and his often stiff walk physicalizes his personality. As superb
as he is, however, it’s Emmanuelle Riva (remarkable in Alain Resnais’ debut, Hiroshima mon Amour, in 1959) who gives an emotionally devastating portrayal
of a woman losing control of her body but not her mind, and whose astonishingly
physical transformation—the actress seems to be receding before our eyes—is the
movie’s lasting and most profound image.
There are perfectly realized
moments of black humor, such as when Georges’ description of an awful funeral
he attended is stopped by Anne suddenly blurting out, “There’s no reason to go
on living,” which in its suddenness is far more persuasive and incisive than
scenes of Anne dealing with being paralyzed on one side or even Georges angrily
slapping his wife when she spits out water he gave her to drink.
And despite the haunting piano
music of Schubert on the soundtrack, the film’s two subplots—visits by
Alexandre, Anne’s former pupil, the pianist whose recital they attended at the
beginning of the film (played by a real-life concert pianist Alexandre Tharaud),
and by their daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert, unable to overcome the clichéd
role of an overly needy daughter), whom they do not want to see her mother’s
demise—seem shoehorned in by Haneke to try and make the film a wider panorama
of relationships. Instead, their appearances mute the film’s attempt to
dramatize the ultimate price paid by its protagonist couple, to its
unfortunate—if not lasting—detriment.
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