Review of Amour (2012) by Susan W — 28 Feb 2013

SPOILER ALERT. This discussion is for people who have seen the film.

At the climactic moment of "Amour," a woman behind me whispered, "I didn't see THAT coming!" I wanted to whisper back "Well, I did. I saw it miles off." This isn't a claim for any great powers of insight, because that moment did not, IMHO, come out of a convincing portrayal of the character's despair. It came out of plot necessity. A natural death from old age is slow and undramatic. The movie needed something quick and shocking to finish the story of Anne's decline and Georges' increasingly hopeless struggle to care for her and preserve her dignity. Then too, of course, the first scene gives everything away. The firemen break into the apartment to find an old woman's body. She obviously didn't die alone; someone laid her out in her best dress and put flowers around her, but then didn't call a doctor to report the death. Why didn't he want anyone to see her body? Duh, three guesses.

My feelings about this movie are very mixed. It has certainly gotten under my skin, and the acting and cinematography are superb. But it's cold, remote, and it denies us obvious ways of feeling emotional rapport with the characters, such as a musical sound track. Yes, yes, I know, that's Haneke's style. And because the characters are musicians, we do learn something about their spiritual life from the source-music that occurs several times in the film. But Haneke's style is deliberately cold and clinical, except for a few scenes that are obvious fantasy or metaphor. The next-to-last scene, when the wife (her ghost? her memory?) appears again, apparently alive and well, and accompanies her husband as they leave the apartment, looks to me like a deliberate homage to "The Shop on Main Street." There too, a failed protector of a frail old woman kills her (accidentally, this time) in a bungled effort to protect her, and then kills himself. At the end, the ghosts of the young man and old woman leave the shop together and walk down the street, presumably free at last of Naziism. But there, the character of Tono was uneducated, not very bright, and initially, of course, ignorantly prejudiced. He had the capacity to grow and develop compassion; his tragedy was that he didn't have enough to save himself and the woman. Perhaps in the face of something as implacable as Naziism or terminal illness, no one does. Is that the message here? I suppose so, but it still left me cold.