Writer/director Michael Haneke makes a very specific type of film. His scripts are lean and meticulous and give you no handholding. He tells his stories in long, unbroken, precisely framed shots that rarely contain more than a single camera movement (and often none). The only music you hear is contextual; the acting style is pure naturalism. As a result, his work strikes some as dry, slow, unengaging, puzzling.
But the unpretentiously intellectual Haneke is one of the very finest filmmakers working today, and Amour is the man on top of his game. It won the Palme d’Or last year at Cannes, and it is my choice for the best film of 2012.
Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are getting on well in their 80s, an intelligent, cultivated couple with all their faculties and no major physical ailments. Their respective careers were successful enough to afford them a modestly splendid flat in Paris. Most importantly, they enjoy an abiding love, full of honesty and mutual respect.
Then Anne has an episode, blanking out at the breakfast table for a couple of minutes before snapping to with no recollection of what has happened. She and Georges understand that this may be the beginning of something serious, but she is resistant to seeing the doctor, sending an implicit message to her husband: Let me live what’s left of my life as peaceably as I can.
Cut to some time later (often you have to catch up with Haneke after an edit, but he gives you the time and info to do so), and Anne is returning from a hospital stay, having suffered a stroke and then undergone a corrective procedure that may have made things worse. “The 5% failure rate,” Georges explains to the couple’s daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert). Anne implores Georges to promise he will not send her back to the hospital, no matter what. When he hesitates, she doesn’t want to hear another word.
There is no happy ending to Amour. Anne deteriorates right before our—and Georges’s—eyes, her world compressed by suffering. Haneke masterfully displays the inexorable, hopeless mundanity of the couple’s situation, often simply by demonstrating the details of what their life has come to: the feelings of loss and limitation that the wheelchair brings, how Anne puts on her glasses now that she has use of only one arm, the setting up of a medical bed, the homecare nurse callously doing Anne’s lipstick and hair so she can look “presentable.” “None of this deserves to be shown,” Georges tells Eva. But there’s nowhere else for the couple to look. Nor for the audience.
Sounds bleak? It is, big time. Haneke is an unflinching artist, and never more so than here. As the end approaches, “hurts” is just about the only word Anne can say (blesse in French, far more of a bleat than its English equivalent). But Amour is far from monochromatic, far too intelligent to be an unnuanced portrayal of decay. “We don’t have to lie, Georges,” Anne says shortly after coming home from the hospital, when it’s already clear what course is charted. They share a deep and honest love. But love always ends, and often not well.
The acting in Amour is simply superb. The courage of the 85-year-old Riva to portray a nightmare that must lie on just the other side of her eyelids is awe-inspiring, but she dives in without any reservation, while never drowning her character in generic suffering. Trintignant’s work is no less impressive, giving us a man whose face is a window into his thoughts, despite his refined deportment. One night he sits on the side of the couple’s bed, his wife sleeping with the stillness of death, and we don’t need a clunky close-up and ham-handed, sad music to see that he is already alone, even while his dear one yet lives.
With the film’s final scene Haneke manages to let the audience off the hook a bit—without undermining anything we’ve seen over the previous two hours—so we leave the theatre a bit less bummed out than we might have. But Amour is in many ways a difficult film to take. But it’s beautiful, and brilliant, and a century from now no film from 2012 will be more admired than this one.
“It was so slow,” said one octogenarian theatergoer to her coevals as the credits rolled. “And I didn’t like the ending.” The irony of her complaint was impossible to miss. But regardless of age, no doubt many people who come to see Amour—because of its Cannes and Oscar buzz (nominated for Best Picture/Director/Actress/Original Screenplay/Foreign Language Film), or because Michael Haneke is becoming a name familiar even to those who know nothing about his work—will come away confused and disappointed. Count on a few people walking out early.
Doesn’t matter. This is magnificent artistry. If you want to see brilliant cinema on the big-screen locally, you will never, ever get a better chance.
Amour is playing at the Art Theatre of Long Beach (2025 E. 4th Street, LB 90804) for a limited engagement. For info on show times call 562.438.5435 or visit arttheatrelongbeach.com.