Michael Haneke (2012)

Amour is fluent and humane.  Since it’s written and directed by Michael Haneke, the second quality is more remarkable than the first:  in view of Haneke’s work to date, you would no more expect a film of his called Amour to celebrate love than you’d have expected a Todd Solondz movie called Happiness to be an illustration of its title.  The lives of the octogenarian married couple Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), as she suffers a series of strokes and becomes entirely dependent on his care, are realised by Haneke with a detailed precision that’s effortless.  You take this for granted yet you know it’s something that only a very gifted film-maker can achieve.  In the same way, the two leads are so good that you’re hardly ever aware of their acting (but you’re aware that you’re hardly ever aware …) Images in your mind of what these two were like half a century or more ago give their senescence a particular charge even though Trintignant (aged eighty-two) and Riva (eighty-six) haven’t been fixtures of international cinema in the intervening decades (at least for audiences outside France).

Georges and Anne are both retired music teachers.  At the start of the film they attend a public recital by a former pupil (played by the pianist Alexandre Tharaud).  Once or twice later on a tape is played in their Paris apartment and Georges sings ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon’ to Anne but one of the most striking things about Amour is the absence of any other music on the soundtrack (even though this is usual in a Michael Haneke film).  Once Anne is housebound, Haneke’s camera also stays within the apartment.  The sustained silence increases the sense of intimacy between the couple and the audience in the cinema (and makes you realise how often a film score can have the opposite effect).  This is also an example of a movie where the isolation of the principal characters is credible because it’s willed by them.  Anne and Georges are in this grave situation together – she and he, especially, are determined, as things get worse, that no one is going to gatecrash:  certainly not their brittle, humourless daughter Eva, who visits occasionally.  I’m not a fan of Isabelle Huppert but the peculiar deadliness with which she invests Eva’s lines is surely just what Haneke had in mind.   It’s not easy to get out of your own mind the sound of Eva rattling on to Anne about her and her British husband (William Shimell)’s financial planning, telling her nearly wordless mother that the interest rate on a savings account is currently 1.75%.  The only other living creature that seems in any way to share the old couple’s situation is a pigeon which twice gets into the apartment and, with the help of Georges, back out again.  You can see the pigeon as a symbol for something or other but it’s the fact that its comings and goings remain mysterious that makes it such a strong and beautiful element of the story.

We understand that particular events cause Anne’s condition to get worse:  we’re not shown all these events but we see their effects.  Haneke does show, in real time, Anne’s first ischaemic episode, which occurs as she and Georges are having breakfast.  This is ‘a moment in and out of time’, in more ways than one.  From Georges’s point of view, it’s a frightening interruption of the flow of his life with Anne; once she ‘comes back’, it’s as if the episode occurred in a different world.  From Anne’s point of view, she has, of course, no memory of what happened – only her husband’s concern to disquiet her.  Amour includes an extraordinarily powerful dream sequence, its impact increased by the fact that the location of Georges’ nightmare is the couple’s apartment – or, at least, the corridor outside the front door of the apartment – so we take what we’re seeing as reality.  Haneke is also very successful in conveying the erosive effects, on morale and physical strength, of grim and, from Anne’s point of view, humiliating routine.  There’s no denying that Anne’s continuing, unstoppable decline is more upsetting because Emmanuelle Riva is so slim and elegant – because she looks still to be within touching distance of Anne’s younger self.  Trintignant’s Georges looks at Anne with a kind of impacted, disbelieving resentment that she’s disappearing but he does everything for her.   You hope that Anne will drift off into death as Georges tells her a childhood story but the end is not peaceful:  it’s a struggle which he, though increasingly weak and tired, has to win.  Haneke doesn’t explain what has happened to Georges at the end of the film but he doesn’t need to.   You accept that Anne’s death is, to all intents and purposes, the end of Georges’ life too.  That he departs with her.

Because Michael Haneke likes and admires his protagonists, and because Riva and Trintignant are moving, Amour seems, compared with Haneke’s earlier work, a relatively emotional piece of work.  Yet it still has a chilliness that I find forbidding.  This quality derives partly from Haneke’s technique, which seems almost too perfect for its subject:  the physically gruelling scenes are staged so skilfully that the technical smoothness is rather appalling.  (The cinematography is by Darius Khondji and the editor is Monika Willi.)   The other chilly element is Anne’s and Georges’s impeccably cultured existence.  Their living room is lined with books and there are tasteful objets d’art in evidence.  They don’t have, though, a pet animal or a television or any trace of vulgarity or frivolity.  Maybe these things don’t make a difference to old age once it descends but the rarefied atmosphere of the couple’s increasingly gloomy apartment emphasises their helplessness.

22 November 2012