Amour also has one
minor character: Eva, Georges and Anne’s daughter, who struggles with her
father to make sense of death – and fails. Mostly Amour
is about three major characters: Anne and Georges, a couple who have grown old
together and are now in their 80s.
And the apartment that contains them.
Anne suffers a debilitating stroke and fails rapidly before
our eyes. Georges assumes the role
of caretaker and witness to her undignified demise. The apartment is a shabby reminder of better times when the
paint was fresh and the rooms were filled with art and music – the books are
still there – and most likely more than a touch of Parisian elegance. A place now reduced to four walls and
furniture limited to two chairs and a settee in the living room, two chairs in
the kitchen, and eventually a hospital bed in the bedroom. A fortress to withdraw to when one
no longer wants to answer the telephone.
If you have not yet seen the film, this review may not be for you. It contains spoilers.
Anne and Georges return from a concert to find the lock
broken on their apartment
door. Anne remarks that if an
invader were to enter, it would frighten her to death. We soon learn that it’s not a burglar
she has to fear; it’s death itself that has entered their space.
Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke makes horror films. Amour is his latest, and the film’s title masks the fact the horror this
time is not ritual suicide, as in The Seventh Continent (1989), terrorist home invasion, as in Funny Games
(1997), or religious sadism and child
abuse, as in The White Ribbon (2009),
but the fact that life itself comes to an end, and the ending can be anything
but pretty.
Amour is not just
another movie about the end of life.
It’s about the end of life as a taboo topic. About death as loss of dignity and the gradual removal
of those things which give life meaning – food and drink, communicating with
loved ones, music, art, pride in one’s appearance, mobility and the illusion of
control over one’s fate.
Emmanuelle Riva’s performance is nothing short of
perfection. How she missed the
Best Actress Oscar this year will always be a mystery. Jean-Louis Trintignant’s performance,
by the same token, shows that Haneke knew what he was doing when he wrote the story for Trintignant. At some point
about halfway through the movie I wondered if I was going to be able make it to the end, but I immediately realized I was so engaged by the
acting skills of these two masters that there was no way I was going to miss
seeing where they would take it.
And there was a second reason, which I’ll get to in a minute.
Amour is a character
study of a man who slowly comes to the realization that he is not up to the
task he is faced with. The old
line that God gives you no task he doesn’t also give you the tools to deal with
may not be true. You’re never
quite sure. Why didn’t Georges and
Anne have a better relationship with their daughter, so she could have stepped
in and helped bear the burden? Why
don’t we all have perfect relationships with all the people in our lives? Why are we all not prepared for the unforseeable?
The unrelenting suffering and loss of dignity is relieved by
one powerful scene where Georges reveals not only an inner strength but what
Anne said to him once at the breakfast table: “You are a monster. But you have been very kind to
me.” We have just witnessed an act
of humiliation. The nurse who has
combed Anne’s hair puts a mirror in front of her face and asks her to
acknowledge that she has made her beautiful. The next thing we see is Georges firing the nurse for
incompetence. The scene gets ugly,
but Georges has restored dignity and your respect for him soars.
It’s a movie about death and dying. It’s also about euthanasia. Haneke clearly wants his audience to
ask themselves how much of this pain and suffering they are willing to
take. I can well imagine a young
person hearing about the plot line and deciding to give the film a miss. This is not a film to enjoy; it’s an
experience to endure. I am the same
age as the filmmaker, and about ten years younger than the main
characters. I am less likely than
a young person to pretend we can brush the topic of death and dying aside. I want to be prepared to take my own
life, and in a way that nobody else will be blamed. I’m not yet ready to plan my death and I am tortured by the question, when will I be? Is leaving it to fate the only real option? I don’t have the
courage or the cowardice – I’m not sure which it is – to look away from the
question Haneke is asking: Do you have what it takes?
If you’re lucky, you will die a natural death. Or you will be cared for in hospice,
surrounded by loved ones. But what
if you mess up, and you don’t get dot all your Is and cross all your Ts? What if you aren’t so lucky? What if you are left to die on your
own, with only one loved one to see you through? Or no loved ones?
It took me two days to realize the movie was not just about
Anne. It's equally, possibly more, about Georges. I realized only after some time the
significance of the detail that Haneke wrote the story for Trintignant. You become so focused on the horror of
Anne’s rapid decline – a year telescoped into two hours – and the fact you are
watching a taboo, that you miss entirely – at least I did – that Haneke stops
before an even bigger taboo. What
becomes of you when you have given your all? When you have taken the responsibility of making a life and
death choice for another human being?
A good deal of the story deals with Anne’s loss of
dignity. The scene with the
insensitive nurse. Another, where
Georges locks the door to her bedroom when Eva shows up unannounced because he
knows Anne doesn’t want to be seen in her present state, even by, and possibly
especially by, her daughter. We
see her being spoon-fed and the food dribbling down her chin, we see her
spitting out water, we see her sitting naked in the shower being bathed by a
stranger. And we see her, in
Georges’ memory flashback, as he wants to remember her, sitting at the
keyboard, the graceful lady she once was.
Haneke doesn’t tell a story so much as lay out events in
ways that force you to ask questions.
A pigeon flies into the apartment, not once, but twice. What is it doing in this film? Is the pigeon a dove? The Holy Spirit? The symbolism doesn’t work. Accidental intrusion of nature
into one’s inner sanctum? Or
perhaps the simple absurdity of life in the end. A metaphor for life as an act of no ultimate consequence, a
momentary distraction.
I am aware, in rereading what I have just written here, that
I’ve portrayed the watching of this film as self-inflicted torture. It is an endurance test, but it’s one
worth enduring. Others have tried to claim this is a movie about devotion,
about two old people who have known love and who ride the end out
together. Or that we should focus
not on Anne’s death and dying but on the fact that she went to her death not alone,
but in the embrace of a man totally devoted to her – that this was the ultimate
love story. You may see it that
way. I didn’t, but you may.
What I saw instead was the other reason I mentioned for
appreciating the film and not wanting to leave the theater. It is rare – so rare that it almost
doesn’t happen at all – that a filmmaker puts all the decision making about
what is transpiring on the screen in the viewers’ own hands. Why does Georges disappear from the
story in the end? Why is this loose
end not tied up? Eva enters the
apartment, as in a coda to a piece of music, and we see it now empty of all
life, all furniture, all trace of illness and death, and there is no sign of
Georges’ last days. We
have seen the obscenity of death in Anne’s slow demise. We are spared having to look at what
happens next. The last taboo. What
happens to Georges? This is
audience participation. Haneke
wants you to write that part of the story.
I’d call Amour a five-star movie. Not because it grabs
you and makes you cry. I didn’t
shed a single tear. And not
because you come out of the theater impressed by superb acting and directing –
which you certainly do. That would
make it a four-star. The fifth
star is for new heights in story-telling honesty. It will be matched in the future, probably. But I doubt it will be excelled.
picture credit 1: http://www.fact.co.uk/whats-on/amour
picture credit 2: http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movies/2012/1219/Amour-is-a-moving-film-but-is-perhaps-unintentionally-uncomfortable-trailer
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