Review of Amour (2012) by Kenneth L — 17 Feb 2013

Well, I saw it, and I survived. To be honest, this is a film that does deal with a very significant and important issue (aging and death) in an thoroughly disciplined, concentrated manner, but I'm still not sure it's a movie I personally would have given a Palme d'Or to. It's good, yes, but it plays out more or less exactly as I had expected it to. I did like it better than The White Ribbon, the one other Michael Haneke movie I've seen so far, but it still doesn't put Haneke into the first rank of world filmmakers, at least for me.

The story is extremely simple: Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are an old Parisian couple. Anne has a stroke, and then Georges takes care of her during her long, slow, painful deterioration. That's it.

The movie is completely and utterly literal and unsentimental in its single-minded focus on the process of dying of old age and sickness. There's no artificial manipulation here - no montages, no sentimental flashbacks, no hysterical scenes of weeping, not even a single note of music except for what the characters themselves listen to. This is the right strategy here, as the film could easily have become emotionally unbearable if it had tried to work the audience over in that way. Instead, we get long, static shots showing exactly what the day-to-day business of caring for a slowly dying person is like. From what I remember of watching a few of my older relatives deteriorate and die, the movie's portrayal is perfectly accurate. Emmanuelle Riva's performance is unbelievably good - if the movie were in English, she would probably win the Best Actress Oscar for it. Jean-Louis Trintignant's performance has been mentioned quite as often, but he's also superb here.

And yet, I can't quite convince myself that this clearly should have won the Palme d'Or. As I said, this movie is completely literal (well, except for the very final scene). It's about dying and nothing else. There's really no philosophical subtext to speak of, other than the cold hard fact that everybody dies. There's no metaphors, no symbolism, no nothing. Just an old woman dying. It's like Cries & Whispers remade by someone who thought the color schemes and camera angles didn't mean anything. Maybe that means that the film is admirably pure in its portrayal of its subject, but then again that isn't really that hard to do. You would never see a Hollywood movie this unsentimental, but this isn't a Hollywood movie, it's a Michael Haneke movie, so sentimentality was never a danger. If you had ever watched someone dying of old age and illness in real life, and then you wanted to make a strictly accurate movie about it, this is exactly the film you would make. It can't really have been that hard to write or direct the movie once Haneke had the basic idea down. There's nothing surprising or unexpected in the movie, and no real reason to watch it a second time once you've seen it. Someone once said that a great movie would be one he couldn't bear to never see again. While I admired this film, I can easily go without ever seeing it again; so by that criterion, while it might be an excellent and highly accomplished movie (which it is), it still isn't quite a great one.