Runtime: 2 hours, 7 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Michael Haneke
Quick Impressions:
All day long, the Hopkins poem “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” has been running through my mind (probably because I took a long walk with my daughter who kept pointing out that the trees and stiff reeds had broken in the wind instead of surviving like the reeds that bent. She, of course, was showing off her knowledge of Aesop’s Fables. I was thinking, “It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.”)
That’s a rather fitting poem to have springing around in your mind while watching Michael Haneke’s Amour, a film about empathy and love in the face of decline and death.
Amour is not for everybody. (To say otherwise would be a bold-faced lie.) Most people who would truly despise the experience of watching the film will probably be kept away by the subtitles, but I am sure there will also be foreign film aficionados who fail to connect with this particular foreign film. (For sure, it’s not a good choice for a first date—unless you’re the type who enjoys subjecting others to social experiments. In that case, making this a first date movie will probably save both you and your date a lot of time.) Some people aren’t going to like Amour because they find the situation hard to relate to. Others won’t like it because they find the situation all too easy to relate to. Frankly, I found the film powerful, moving, and incredibly well done, but I’m not sure I would ever voluntarily sit through it again. (Well, yes, I would, but not for pleasure. If I wanted to write an essay about it, of course I would have to re-watch it, then.)
If you’re not sure if the film is for you, I’ll just quickly remind you of the premise. Amour is a two-hour Austrian film from the director of Funny Games (1997, 2007) about two French octogenarians in an apartment. One of them is slowly dying (in French, inside that apartment) from a series of strokes which cause accelerated physical and mental decline. The other one is the man who loves her. If you think you’ll like that movie, then you probably will.
If after hearing the premise, you don’t want to see Amour despite its Oscar buzz, don’t feel guilty. Don’t even give that decision a second thought. Michael Haneke has won the Palme d’Or at Cannes three times. He makes meaningful films about whatever he wants, and they’re usually well received (even acclaimed) internationally. That should take some pressure off the rest of us. Trust me, if you would prefer to watch Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters instead of Amour, Michael Haneke does not care.
The Good:
In a way, it is strange that Amour is not for everybody because death is for everybody.
In that way, if you’re put-off by the premise and choose not to watch Amour, the joke’s on you because eventually you’re going to end up seeing someone’s slow death anyway (even if it’s only your own). (I suppose you might escape this by dying young in an accident, but good luck with that. It’s pretty hard to pull off if you’re trying.)
Like Anne, my grandmother died at home in her eighties following a period of extreme decline after a series of small strokes. My grandfather had died eight years before, so Grandma lived (and died) in our home where my mother (like Georges) cared for her as best she could. By the end, Grandma’s mobility was extremely limited. She didn’t use a wheelchair but should have. She basically used my mother instead. She was incontinent, mentally regressed to a child-like state, and often confused and delusional. She could speak with less difficulty than Anne, but what she said made little sense. She avoided eating and often resorted to hiding her food or hoping my mother would forget to give her Ensure. One day she told me, “I don’t know when I’m going to get better from this” because she thought she had an illness like the flu, though she couldn’t remember the beginning of the illness. Her confusion broke my heart.
To care for someone (in the literal, physical sense, day in, day out) requires often Herculean effort, both physical and mental. Georges is immediately sympathetic for that reason. And because of her decline, Anne is immediately pitiable. But Anne doesn’t want pity, and Georges isn’t trying to be noble to impress others. He simply does what he must because he loves Anne. Amour is a movie about the end of a love affair, a love affair that ends in death.
There’s a wonderful moment in the movie when the couple’s daughter, Eva (played by Isabelle Huppert) asks her father something like, “So what happens now?”
In Amour, Anne has a stroke. Then she has an operation. It fails, which means that her condition will continue to decline until she dies. That’s the beginning of the movie. It ends when she dies. That’s what happens. Life happens until death.
The people who show up to help and praise Georges all struck me as being (though kind) ultimately self-interested (not in a bad way). They’re sorry for the couple and impressed with the husband’s behavior primarily because as humans they empathize. One day something (like this or like something else) will happen to them. We all die.
The character of Alexandre, the music prodigy (played by Alexandre Tharaud) particularly impressed me. I saw too much of myself in his cringe-worthy reaction to Anne’s condition—“I made you this gift because looking at you makes me sad. I hope you get better because I’m too young and naïve to realize that ‘getting better’ is not on the table.” I hope I wasn’t like that when I was younger, but I’ll bet I was. I’m probably like that now.
Jean-Louis Trintignant is wonderful in the lead role. I think he’s just as good as Riva, though his role makes fewer (and different) demands. I love the way Georges says the name “Anne.” You can tell how much he loves her just by the way he breathes out her name.
Isabelle Huppert (whose presence always makes me think of her hilarious turn in I Heart Huckabees) is also quite good as the daughter, though I found the character somewhat frustrating.
Another (probably unintended) virtue of the film—it’s wonderful for people trying to learn French. Seriously, with my four semesters of college French I could probably have watched it without subtitles and understood enough. Most of the movie is just Georges and Anne talking. And they talk very, very slowly in rather simple sentences about the kinds of things that often come up in foreign language classes.
Actually, I’d like to watch the film again (see, I knew there was a reason I’d watch it again) without subtitles to see how much I would understand. I’m fairly certain that you could follow it even with no French at all because the plot is simple and the themes are universal.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Emmanuelle Riva):
All the time, I hear, “What a courageous performance!” or “She’s so brave!” Well, if you want brave, I give you Emmanuelle Riva. It’s not like she’s a twenty-year-old in prosthetics playing a declining old woman. She is an eighty-five-year-old still in miraculous possession of good health and all her faculties playing a woman who becomes paralyzed, demoralized, senile, and incontinent after suffering from a series of strokes.
I will never have that kind of courage.
I mean, we’ll all die sooner or later, but when you’re eighty-five, it’s already later. Then again, all eighty-five-year-olds know that death is coming whether they play-act decline or not. But when Riva shows us the sad story of Anne’s decline, she’s using her real body. How can you stay sane at eighty-five when you’re showing the audience the demeaning embarrassments illness brings upon a woman who has your real body?
Julie Christie was fantastic in the movie Away from Her, in which she was nominated (the year Marion Cotillard upset) for playing an elderly woman suffering from Alzheimer’s. But looking ethereally beautiful yet vacant is completely different from showing everyone the physical effects of age and illness on your actual body. (I’m not knocking Julie Christie’s marvelous performance. I’m just pointing out that the demands of Emmanuelle Riva’s are far more brutal.)
Anne is a character who (though piteous) does not want pity. She wants to maintain dignity and preserve normalcy for as long as she possibly can (really, longer). My favorite moment comes when she tries to pour the tea, but the film is full of excellent moments.
By the way, Emmanuelle Riva’s eighty-sixth birthday happens to be February 24, coincidentally also the date of this year’s Academy Awards ceremony.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Michael Haneke):
The protagonists in this film are retired music teachers. Presumably until Anne’s first attack, music is at the center of their lives. But this movie has no soundtrack. The entire film is silent (in terms of background music) except for very rare moments when music is actually played by one of the characters. Meanwhile, you hear the strain in the silence. You hear every mundane sound as what begins as something horrible settles into something routine and then gradually becomes a horrible routine.
Of course, Haneke gets a great performance from all his actors, but I think his true genius lies in the way he presents them to us. This is a movie that raises difficult topics and forces you to think about them. There aren’t a lot of movies like that. Most “difficult topics” movies ask questions. But Amour already seems to have all the answers. They’re just not always pretty.
Best Joke:
If you’re hoping for a comedy, look elsewhere. But there is actually a very funny one-liner delivered by Georges during their discussion of funerals. My husband and I both laughed out loud. (I mean, we went, “Ha!”, not that we fell out of our chairs laughing uncontrollably for minutes.) Nobody else laughed. I don’t understand why not because it was funny. Georges and Anne don’t laugh, but they don’t have to because they know each other so well.
Best Scene:
There’s a particularly powerful moment (chilling, really) when Anne tries to fill her tea cup. The scene leading up to it is good, but the moment is beyond good. I felt it viscerally.
I also love the stories that Georges tells Anne, both of them.
Visually:
The scene when Georges wanders out into the hallway has a distinctly eerie ending. There’s quite a lot of visual symbolism at work in this film, but a movie review is not the place to go into details. The plot here is straight forward, so talking in depth about the artistry is what would spoil the movie.
The Negatives:
The film is not exactly what you’d call pleasurable to watch (in the traditional sense). But I think I’ve made that clear by now. The slow pace, silent rooms, and bleak content aren’t flaws, however, since they’re all done deliberately to achieve precisely the effect that the director wants. But don’t go into this expecting a sentimental, Hollywood love story. The film is brilliant, but for mainstream audiences mediocre is sometimes a lot more satisfying.
I’ve heard some people complain about the ending. I do think that what happens to Georges (I mean specifically) is not completely clear, but I also don’t think it needs to be any clearer than it is. (I mean, we’ve got the gist of what happened. Do we need the details?)
What happens to Anne should not be shocking. Seriously, how are some people shocked? If you don’t see that coming in the first (to be charitable, I’ll give you) thirty minutes of the movie, then you are not paying attention. I’m hardly the best guesser of movie plots, and I could see that coming right from the start.
But here’s what bothers me about Amour. Throughout, a central concern is that Anne wants to preserve her dignity. She does not want to become a spectacle or an object of pity. Georges is sympathetic to her wish for privacy. At one point, he pointedly tells their daughter that her mother is bed-ridden, diminished, incontinent, and so forth, and says that such things don’t need to be seen. I agree with him. Why linger over a person’s sad deterioration? Give the woman the privacy she longs for. Let her die on her own terms behind closed doors.
But here’s the thing—all this stuff that doesn’t need to be seen, Michael Haneke has made an entire two hour movie about it in order to show it to us. And we see it all. We see the lesson in diapering, Riva’s naked body (including her breasts), the leg exercises, the sputtering incoherence, the withered, paralyzed arm. We see her repeated pleas to stop living like that. We see the times (some of them heart-breaking) when the couple loses patience with one another.
Now maybe Haneke’s point is that despite our wishes, such things must be seen. Nobody wants to stare death in the face, but it’s not like our reluctance is going to make death give up and go away. So much of what happens to Anne is so ugly and so inevitable. Yet even in the face of such ugly inevitability, Georges’s love is beautiful (perhaps doubly beautiful because its existence is so puzzling). Why do we mortal creatures bother to love at all? Why do we give our love to other mortal creatures?
I don’t know (but that doesn’t matter).
Overall:
Amour is a great film and like most great films, it’s not easy to watch. It’s beautiful (but not glamorous), sad (but not maudlin), intense (but not overproduced), tragic (but not contrived). It’s just a story about the central concerns of humanity—love, life, and death. Georges and Anne could be anyone. We all die. If we’re fortunate, someone cares.