I had a few drinks and then walked into
my bathroom to find Emmanuelle Riva in her role as Anne, naked and moaning
while a nurse bathed her methodically.
It wasn’t the first time I had one of
these experiences. Sober or not, I
have been seeing clips from Michael Haneke’s Amour in my waking life ever since screening. If the best films settle inside of you
and stay with you forever, then Amour is
the best at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film has haunted me since I stumbled in a stupor out of the theatre.
Michael Haneke is the mastermind of
cinema. Calling him an academic
would diminish his aesthetic; there’s enough emotion in Funny Games to capsize The Strangers
and every other home-intruder horror knockoff. His films jar the heart in a way that suggests Brakhage and
Aronofsky. Let me put it this way:
watching Haneke is an exercise in how we see everything¾love, hate, horror, et al¾with our own eyes.
Arriving three years after Haneke’s Palme
d’Or-winning The White Ribbon, Amour is a voyeuristic study of the end
of life. Jean-Louis Trintignant
plays Georges, an elderly man who shifts from husband to caretaker after his
wife Anne suffers a debilitating stroke.
Both Georges and Anne are retired music teachers, and other than this
barely-mentioned fact, Haneke provides little background information on their
life and relationship. Is it out
of character for Georges to talk sternly to Anne in their old age? How can anyone know? Haneke skips these facts, and an
argument over character development may arise in certain critical circles.
Haneke likes to probe, and his razor-sharp
eye picks apart everything in the screen.
The house seems less like a house and more like a laboratory or a
theatre set or a dollhouse.
Georges and Anne are on display, and this filmmaking decision is bold,
especially in the context of a film concerning an elderly couple.
However, Haneke does not focus on Georges
and Anne’s previous life because he intends Amour
to be a sentimental ode to life and love, even though the title is clearly
translated as “love.” Haneke wants
to show us the starkest realities of love: the diaper changing, the feeding,
the blank stares, the nightmares, and the helplessness. For a first-time viewer of Haneke, this
approach to cinema and “love” in general may seem alienating and even boring.[1] I’m not saying that in order to
perfectly view the film, one has to know the catalogue, but it certainly helps.
The bulk of Amour is comprised of Haneke showing us these realities. As the film progresses, Anne’s physical
and mental state worsens. She
becomes incoherent in her speech, and she no longer recognizes her family. Watching Anne devolve into a vegetable is
shocking and almost impersonal, but Haneke pairs this narrative with the
outlying problems related to the nigh impossible task of keeping someone alive
whose body is failing. Georges
works day and night to aid his wife, but even he becomes frustrated. In one appalling but altogether human
scene, Georges slaps Anne on the face because she refuses to eat or drink
anything. I can tell myself I
would never do such an act, but I don’t know a damn thing about what it means
to live with death stalking around every corner.
The majority of responses I have heard
about this film deal specifically with that previous sentence. Those who can relate to a similar life
event while watching the film find it to be sad and heavy. This way of looking at Amour is valid, but the film is much
larger than that. You don’t have
to know someone who had a stroke to be able to feel the seismic smack to the
gut when Anne sits at her piano and moves drunkenly with the music she seems to
be playing. The camera cuts to
Georges (with Trintignant’s characteristic stoic expression), who turns and shuts
off the music coming from their sound system. Anne has not been playing the piano at all. The scene is surprising in a strange
way (think of the dog falling out of the van in Funny Games) but also unashamedly heartbreaking.
Michael Haneke has taken everyone at the
Cannes Film Festival to the edge of death with Amour. Like the best
art, it is hard to endure and poignant in the most unrelenting fashion. The images are still seared into my
brain, and somehow, I find that fact both unsettling and comforting.
[1] Even the idea of Haneke making a film
about love is funny, almost as if he’s mocking the fact that others may view
him as a cold director. Those
people, along with the aforementioned Haneke virgins, are in for a ride.
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