Review of Amour (2012) by Andrew C — 18 Feb 2013

It starts with a woman dead on her bed, adorned in flowers. For those who saw the poster or heard the premise of a man caring for his suffering wife, its startling to have the film give away the ending.

Yet its giving nothing away by showing the body. Haneke doesn't care to keep you in suspense of whether Ms. Laurent, played with heart-wrenching honesty by Emmanuelle Riva, is going to survive her slow decay.

She doesn't. The film isn't about death, so the death isn't important. The film is, as the title suggests, about love. In a year that yielded puzzles like Holy Motors and The Master, the typically cryptic Haneke (who out-puzzles them all with the haunting Cache) makes a film more simple than any other this year: The film is about suffering, and how we endure it.

Jean-Louis Trintignant's Georges suffers himself in order to ease his wife's suffering, yet his wife wishes to die and only continues to suffer for her husband's sake. But even that description attempts to give the film more academic meaning, and fails it.

What Haneke does, through a series of long take and motionless camera, is give an unflinching portrait of suffering, and the slow death we will all one day face, either in the role of George or Anne. Any other film would cutaway and make reference to Anne losing control of her bowels, or show her briefly try to utter a sentence before pulling away to have other cast members discuss it.

Because witnessing it is too hard. Haneke doesn't move away. He puts it there, the entirety of George discovering Anne's stained sheets, lifting her feebly from the bed, and carrying her to wash her down.

He devote whole minutes to watching Anne attempt to assemble a sentence, while her eyes show such anguish at the comprehension that she is uttering nonsense. Haneke does this, not to make the audience suffer, not to shock or to horrify, but because he intends to capture humanity more truly than any other filmmaker has.

The film isn't somber, it isn't bleak. Its simply reality. And the actions depicted are the definition of love, more than any other film has depicted. No more is Haneke hinting at elements of humanity, he is simply capturing life, and connecting with those he has never before reached.

This is love.