Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
2012’s Amour is Haneke’s most critically regarded work, all the way up to the Oscars, and in a lot of ways feels like Haneke’s direct response to critics of his usual working style like what I’ve been doing in this podcast. Certainly, it’s his most intimate and involving work.
In Paris, Jean-Louis Trintignant’s Georges Laurent and Emmanuelle Riva’s Anne Laurent play happily married, retired octogenarian piano teachers, whose lives become a lot more complicated when Anne undergoes a stroke. One botched artery surgery later, she’s left paralysed on her right side and stuck in a wheelchair, but wants to remain in their home, not a hospital or care home. Georges promises this, and sets about the task of full time carer.
Without minimising the events of the film, narratively speaking that set-up will tell you most of what you need, with life becoming more stressful and less enjoyable for both Anne and Georges first by slivers, already enough to drive Anne to contemplate suicide, then by jumps as Anne suffers a second stroke and is left with severe dementia.
It’s a powerful look at love and responsibility, up to and including Georges final duty, or act of love, or crime, depending on how you view these things, and I’m not here to interpret that for you. Given the subject matter, it’s not a film I can say I enjoyed, but it’s a film that I, and I’m sure you, will appreciate for it’s many moments of warmth, and of tragedy, and heartbreak, but all tempered with a contemplation of what it means to have shared a lifetime to be with someone.
I feel like I should have a lot more to say on this, but I don’t, really. Again, the Haneke table stakes of it looking great are there, although I suppose even by his standards he’s got incredible performances from the cast, of course Trintignant and Riva prime amongst them. It’s a hell of a film, and its acclaim is well earned. There’s none of Haneke’s films that aren’t in some way challenging, mostly I find in the sense of actually connecting with the characters and events of the film. It’s interesting, then, to find this challenging for the exact opposite reason.
Great filmmaking, but not of the type that will leave you on a high note.