Amour
(France/Germany/Austria, 127 min.)
Written and directed by Michael Haneke
Starring: Jean-Louis
Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert.
Georges and Anne have been through a lot together. They’ve
deported a homeless immigrant (Code
Unknown), been harassed by a hidden voyeur (Caché), and they have twice been tortured by wayward teens (Funny Games and Funny Games US). Now, Michael Haneke’s favourite everycouple is at
their greatest trial. The time has come for Georges and Anne to test their marriage
vows. “For richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health,” Georges and Anne
have said as they’ve grown old together. It’s finally death’s turn for the
eighty-year-old couple, but even death won’t do them part.
Haneke drops the viewer into the final stage of the marriage
of Georges and Anne Laurent, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Oscar-nominee
Emmanuelle Riva. Georges and Anne are a pair of well-to-do retired music
teachers. They’re cultured people, as their Paris apartment, fortified with bookshelves
and artwork, suggests.
Trintignant and Riva give exceptional performances as the
aging couple. Riva is especially good in a mostly physical performance—she
spends much of the film bedridden—and shows the light slowly fading away from
her character as Anne gradually chooses to stop clinging to life. Haneke veteran Isabelle Huppert also gives a strong supporting turn as Georges and
Anne’s daughter, Eva. Eva takes the most dramatic reaction to Anne’s health,
and her commonplace response to death offers a rare access point for one to
interrogate what the film seems to be doing with its near-sterile portrait of
life and death.
Observing Georges and Anne primarily through a stationary
camera, lensed beautifully by DP Darius Khondji (Midnight in Paris), Amour presents
the Laurents’ marriage for one to watch like an intrusive fly on the wall. When
Anne suffers a stroke one morning at breakfast, the disquieting long takes of Amour become almost unbearably
uncomfortable. “Watch death work,” the film seems to say. Death, a subject that
is frequently hidden from squeamish society, receives a near clinical analysis
as Georges cares for Anne during the deterioration of her final days. Not too
early on in the film does Anne say with the utmost clarity—and without a shred
of romanticism—that there is no point for her to go on living. Frank and
unsentimental is the approach that Haneke takes as he makes Georges confront the
inevitability of Anne’s death.
As one witnesses Anne’s declining health through Haneke’s
cold observational style, one can only see the truth in her provocative
statement. There comes a point when it seems cruel to force Anne to keep on
living. Georges, at some point, should let his wife die if that is indeed her
wish.
Georges is confronted with mortality—both his and
Anne’s—twice in Amour. A little
pigeon visits the Laurents’ apartment twice during the film. The pigeon’s first
visit comes around the midpoint of the film. Georges arrives home to find the
window open and the bird walking about the apartment’s immaculate floors. Anne,
now confined to her deathbed and tucked away in her bedroom, knows not of the
pigeon’s intrusion. Georges hobbles after the bird and tries to shoo it out the
window. This pigeon, however, has the spark of life: it has energy, it has
mobility, and it can choose whether it stays or goes. The bird offers some
welcome relief in Amour, whether it’s
the funny image of a bird thwarting an old man or it’s the tangible sense of
life that appears in this scene.
The pigeon’s second appearance comes towards the end of the film.
In what is arguably the film’s most enigmatic moment, Georges again chases the
bird around the apartment. In the shot, which is perhaps the longest take in
the film, Georges tries to catch the bird and it evades him. Georges, like
Anne, isn’t what he used to be. Life is a flying bird; death is an old woman
confined to her bed.
Amour, even at its
most startling moments, arguably marks Haneke’s most accessible work to date. The
digestibility of the film is surprising given the cold, detached style of his
process. It’s alarming how little emotion the film evokes even though death
lingers in every frame. (The initial framing device ensures that one is always
aware of Anne’s fate.) However, the absence of emotional conflict is rather
ingenious, for Amour avoids the
obstruction that usually prevents people from talking about death. Death
doesn’t need to be a passionate affair. It’s simply a fact of life. In some
cases, then, taking a life is an act of murder. Other times, however, it’s
simply an act of love.
Photos: ©Films du Losange, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics / Mongrel Media