Michael Haneke has the reputation of being a master director, but one whose work tends to be cold and cynical. Funny, then, that his new film, Amour, is one of the most complex and affecting portrayals of love and devotion that has hit the big screen in years. Haneke being Haneke, he isn’t telling a tale of romance and roses though. Instead, Amour is about a couple in their 80s and the hardships they’re forced to endure once the woman has a stroke and begins the steady but painfully protracted march toward death. When deciding whether or not to watch this one, it’s important to remember that there are a handful of moments here that are so beautiful and touching they’ll make your heart feel like it’s going to swell and burst, because the rest of the movie—damn—it can be pretty rough to get through. The slow death of a loved one is probably the worst thing that a person can endure in this life, and Haneke uses every trick in his considerable playbook to make you feel every possible bit of the pain that comes along with it.
Haneke’s master touch is clear from the opening image: a deep focus shot on a theater audience that allows you to see the whole crowd’s faces in crystal clear detail. We watch them watch, and slowly we’re eased into the deliberate and difficult experience that is Amour. The scene seems to tell you to slow down and get comfortable, because this film isn’t so much a journey as it is a meditation. The reason we’re watching this audience is that our two protagonists, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), are a part of it. As the film opens they’re a couple of normal retirees enjoying a night out, casual in their culture and capability. There doesn’t seem to be a single thing wrong in their world or their marriage. Then Haneke starts to put the screws to us.
This opening scene, where everyone is so bright-eyed and intelligent, works in stark contrast to the rest of the film, where we gradually begin to experience what it must be like to watch a loved one degenerate. And experience is the right word here. Amour doesn’t attempt to tell you a story about death, it instead attempts to make you feel the effects of death. Essentially the entire film takes place inside the protagonists’ apartment with no real narrative track taken other than the simple one that leads from Anne’s initial stroke to her eventual last breath. That may sound like it could get boring, but, quite the contrary, it’s actually completely captivating; and a lot of that is due to the craftsmanship of the director.
There are lots of still shots here, shots that linger on a subject far longer than they would in any other movie. But, unlike the still shots in, say, the works of Steve McQueen (Shame), there’s nothing showy about the way that Haneke leaves his camera sitting still. The intent is not to shock you with audacity, but to make sure the film develops at its own pace. Here you’re not moving along at an edited clip the way the abbreviated lives of movie characters often do, you’re sitting with people who feel real, experiencing tragic events alongside them in what feels like real time. Watching Georges try to take care of Anne, and watching Anne’s pride, stubbornness, and pain make that a more difficult job than he could ever have imagined it would be, feels much more like the torture of sitting around and waiting for inevitable bad news than it does sitting down to be entertained. As a matter of fact, if Haneke’s photography weren’t so assured, and his actors’ performances weren’t so captivating, Amour might start to border on torture. Fortunately, they are that assured and captivating, and the emotions that this movie evokes are far too powerful for it to ever be described an unwelcome experience.
You become so immersed in Georges and Anne’s lives, and Haneke stages his scenes so deliberately, that even the smallest thing can bring drama and tension to the film. From the very first moment Anne is brought home in a wheelchair—still perfectly capable of thinking and communicating her thoughts—and her chair gets left pointed away from her husband and their landlord as they have a discussion, you understand that she is now fundamentally different, that she’s now separate from the rest of the world. There are the people who take care of themselves and the people who need to be taken care of. There are the living and the dying. You become so acutely aware of the ticks of this elderly couple that, at one point, an empty salt shaker is enough to let you know that there is trouble in their world and things are about to get bad. And, oh boy, do things get bad.
We’re trapped in this apartment, and, even more, trapped in Georges and Anne’s bodies, to the point that this movie often takes on horror elements. In several places Amour becomes biology horror on the level of something like the original Alien. A lot of that simply comes from the act of watching people eat. When you’re really faced with staring at it and understanding it, there’s something very off-putting and gross about the way we stick organic matter in our mouths in order to stay alive. From the early scenes where we watch a couple of old people too deliberately eating green beans—which is depressing in its own right—to the end of the film, where Georges is desperately trying to slop enough oatmeal into Anne’s slack mouth in order to keep her alive, Haneke’s camera sits still and makes us stare at people eating. As Georges moves from room to room in their quite large apartment, we don’t follow him through quick edits, the camera stays with his slow, frail body as it makes every deliberate step down those long hallways. In their old age and ill health Georges and Anne consistently fail to perform tasks as quickly and efficiently as an able body would, and you’re left sitting there to struggle alongside them. The tension and the frustration of this grows, to the point where you eventually want to tear out of your own skin to escape the experience. To have a body, to grow old, to die... is there anything in the world scarier?
The main conflict of the film is that Anne, in her pride, refuses to be taken to a hospital. Instead she wants to die in her home, which puts the burden of her care on her husband. He feeds her, he bathes her, he does speech therapy with her when she gets to the point where she can no longer speak. Somewhere around the time when she starts wetting herself, something in you turns, and you start to hate the woman for her insistence on putting all of this weight on her husband. Here Haneke takes the conflict out of the film and puts it inside you. It’s impossible to watch a story like this and not wrestle with how you would handle being in the same situation. Is it right to hate someone who is suffering so much? Is it possible not to when they simultaneously create so much suffering in you? Watching Amour is a layered experience, one that deepens over the course of its runtime, and by the time it reaches its climax, the results couldn’t be any more cathartic, or any more traumatic. This is the sort of movie that you have to build up your courage to watch, and that you’re probably not going to want to revisit too often, but that’s going to stick with you for a very long time after it’s over.
As was already mentioned, much of the impact of this film is due to the craftsmanship of its director, but the rest of it has to be credited to the performances that its two stars give. It’s hard to put into words what exactly Trintignant and Riva are able to accomplish with their handling of this difficult material, but the results of their work are indisputably extraordinary. They couldn’t be more natural or more affecting in their roles, making these two of the very best performances you’ll see all year. Georges and Anne aren’t the usual inspirational figures who we’re used to watching deal with mortality on screen, they’re intellects and realists. They were once proud and capable, and instead of overcoming insurmountable adversity, they get defeated by it to the point where they regress to babbling infancy. More than anything, they feel real, which is profoundly refreshing. Amour faces the worst of life, does it with a clear head and little sentimentality, and the results are at times bittersweet, at times painful, at times darkly comedic, and at times just dark. If you’re looking to get run over by an emotional dump truck, this is your movie.
