Amour

It’s become a life’s call­ing for all devot­ed Hanek­e­ri­ans (as they like to be known) to act as free­lance image con­sul­tants to the impe­ri­ous and severe Aus­tri­an direc­tor they so admire. It’s a tough job. Michael Haneke appears to take an almost mani­a­cal plea­sure in tan­ning humanity’s col­lec­tive hide, whether for our hap­less shirk­ing of class respon­si­bil­i­ty (Hid­den), our innate­ly fascis­tic behav­iour­al impuls­es (The White Rib­bon), our inabil­i­ty to tem­per base emo­tion­al urges (The Piano Teacher), or sim­ply because, as a species, we’re doomed to obliv­ion (The Cas­tle, Fun­ny Games).

But, as the Hanek­er­ian will sure­ly claim, he is not a glut­ton for pun­ish­ment. His films are, in fact, full of com­pas­sion, poet­ry and even – if you real­ly squint – joy. His Palme d’Or-winning lat­est, Amour, is Haneke’s answer to the weepie. Even though its sub­ject mat­ter is almost par­o­d­i­cal­ly grim, it’s a film that offers a rare glimpse of the director’s humane side. Though he might say oth­er­wise, Amour comes across as an aus­tere artic­u­la­tion of brac­ing­ly per­son­al fears.

Jean-Louis Trintig­nant and Emmanuelle Riva are Georges and Anne, a pair of elder­ly, retired music teach­ers liv­ing togeth­er in a hum­ble apart­ment. They don’t appear to have many friends (they go to con­certs alone), they don’t appear to have much mon­ey (they tra­verse Paris by bus) and they don’t appear to have much in the way of fam­i­ly (Isabelle Hup­pert plays their daugh­ter, but the rela­tion­ship they share can hard­ly be described as warm).

Anne suf­fers a mild stroke, and the film sim­ply, direct­ly, pun­ish­ing­ly charts the process of her phys­i­cal and men­tal decom­po­si­tion. Georges, with his light limp and bat­tle-hard­ened deter­mi­na­tion, takes it upon him­self to make Anne’s pro­tract­ed jour­ney into the abyss a com­fort­able one. He takes small respite from a sly cig­a­rette or a blast of Schubert.

Almost in cahoots with the immo­bil­i­ty of its cen­tral char­ac­ters, Dar­ius Konji’s cam­era glides, ghost-like, through the autum­nal con­fines of the apart­ment, occa­sion­al­ly halt­ing to mon­i­tor the trag­ic and humil­i­at­ing rou­tines that come before death. By the end of the film, we have a rare inti­ma­cy with the geog­ra­phy of this place, this prison.

Haneke does noth­ing to force undue sen­ti­ment; the over­rid­ing mood is one of esca­lat­ing melan­choly and bit­ter accep­tance rather than unchecked ter­ror. Georges and Anne are ret­i­cent about express­ing their mutu­al love, but this state­ly film is about the ways in which we demon­strate undy­ing affec­tion with­out even know­ing it.

When she threat­ens to go on hunger strike, Georges slaps Anne because he can’t bare to see her stop fight­ing. There’s also a love­ly moment where Georges helps the semi-paral­ysed Anne from a wheel­chair into an arm­chair, and for a won­der­ful sec­ond they share a brief slow dance.

Though the major­i­ty of the film takes place in the grey-brown rooms of their apart­ment, the direc­tor allows our cou­ple to vic­ar­i­ous­ly expe­ri­ence the out­side world through pho­tographs, paint­ings, music, dreams and occa­sion­al vis­i­ta­tions from friends and family.

Indeed, one of the film’s most strange­ly mov­ing moments sees Haneke – in a flour­ish can­ni­ly bor­rowed from his own Code Unknown – cut­ting away from a close-up shot of Georges strug­gling to feed Anne to a silent mon­tage of can­vas­es depict­ing coun­try­side vis­tas that hang in their flat. The sug­ges­tion here is that these sta­t­ic impres­sions of nature are the only way in which the cou­ple will expe­ri­ence the great out­doors again.

Trintig­nant and Riva are so extra­or­di­nary and pre­cise, it’s hard to fath­om just how Haneke man­aged to coax these per­for­mances from them. Beyond the events pre­sent­ed with­in the film, Amour makes a bold state­ment about the trau­ma­tis­ing demands of screen act­ing and the per­ver­si­ty of being paid to enact your own demise. It also works as a detailed doc­u­ment of the ways in which indus­try pro­vides a con­sol­ing machin­ery for death.

But for all its appar­ent ten­der­ness, Amour still feels like a stern les­son in death. Every shot, every line of dia­logue, every nuance, every cut is so sti­fling­ly pre­cise and loaded with mean­ing that the film begins to resem­ble the yel­low­ing pages of a med­ical text­book. Even an amus­ing digres­sion in which a pigeon enters the flat through a win­dow equates to lit­tle more than a giant, flap­ping, open metaphor.

If it seems harsh to be crit­i­cis­ing Haneke’s unspar­ing rigour and his empir­i­cal search for for­mal and intel­lec­tu­al per­fec­tion when so many direc­tors are open to com­pro­mise, then let’s look at it this way: Amour is a film that deals exclu­sive­ly in solu­tions, answers and truths. It tells. It shows. It reveals. It is about what it is about. The ques­tion we must ask is whether a film that lacks any sense of open­ness can ever be tru­ly great. Per­haps not.