Mumbai Film Festival Review: Amour (Spoiler Free)
Directed By: Michael Haneke
There is something of a monumental purport to the latest
film by Michael Haneke, which is typically immaculately mounted and exactingly
detailed. This inherent gravity in the picture is lent perhaps by the subject
of the film, which is the end and decay of life, or perhaps by its two stars
whose titanic faces and performances play out the compelling drama as if it
were all of human life itself being recounted on the silver screen.
Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle
Riva star as George and Anne, two retired music teachers in their 80’s who live
alone in their Paris apartment. This Parisian apartment where the drama plays
out is a place of affluence, refinement and culture, a setting judiciously
chosen by Haneke to discard the melodramatic aspects that poverty can have on
such a story and to highlight the fact that the enlightened die just as those
who are not, the drama of death is at once final and universal.
The apartment, adorned with artistic
paintings, books and CDs and a grand piano, forms the entirety of the setting
and the camera does not veer out even for a second, save for a brief prelude
before the movie begins. Haneke wanted to inhibit the picture with the three
Classical Unities of Greek Theater - Space, Time and Action - and he does so
admirably with a script whose construction is magnificently controlled and rock
solid and the ellipsis of events genuinely lends the feeling of watching time
pass by. Scenes are held just for as long as they need to be. On the level of construction
alone, the film is a masterpiece.
Its formal pleasures don’t end there as
Haneke’s direction is simply staggering for the absolutely unblinking gaze it
takes at life. His staging seems almost informal here, actions ripped out of
life itself, but of course everything is rigorously directed and composed, down
to the many masterful long takes that pepper the film and that would have
demanded a lot from his pair of octogenarian stars.
They transcend the challenge and
deliver performances so real that there is the impression of voyeuristically witnessing
the life of a real couple. Trintignant has the quieter role as he comes to grips
with his marriage slowly dissolving as he watches his wife die gradually but
there is an admirably steely reserve to his performance which brings to the
fore the pragmatic and unsentimental approach taken by Haneke in telling this
story. Trintignant’s George serves the ever devolving situation as resolutely
as he can but Haneke’s camera catches him at unawares, a painful look here, a
sigh there is absolutely heart-breaking. It is Anne who is unconsciously losing
her life but it is this man who is fighting death in a way that even she is
not.
Riva meanwhile is saddled with the much
more physically demanding role of the dying Anne who begins to lose her
physical bearings and then her mental ones. Paralyzed in one part of the body
after she suffers from a stroke, Riva portrays the physical decay so horrifyingly;
it makes you weep bitter tears about the indignities of old age. Barely able to
walk on one leg and then wheelchair bound, Riva goes the whole mile portraying
Anne in her final stages as a woman who is not even lucid anymore talking gibberish
and crying in pain. Amid the decay, she shows flashes of the once proud woman
who was a deeply intelligent and capable human being and in one such moment she
extracts from George a promise to never take her to the hospital again, a
promise which hangs over the film and haunts it.
Haneke’s Love is tough but also gratifyingly so. It is the
love which transcends mortality as we see the extent to which it can take us.
There is no frivolousness here, just an overwhelming feeling of what it is like
to live life and what it is like to love truly and unselfishly.
Confronted with such a movie as this, Nanni Morett’si jury was helpless and handed the Austrian maestro his second consecutive Palme D’Or and it could not have been more deserved.
5/5
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10 Reasons why not to see this movie:
ReplyDelete1. No conclusion to that muvi
2. Assuming wat the end means is upto you
3. The muvi is so slow so slow that u can shit and come 200 times till d muvi gets over and u will not miss anything
4. No proper direction
5. Its very vague in its story
6. The motive behind the muvi is very unclear as in wat the director is trying to show is upto the viewer hw he assumes it
7. The entire muvi is shot in 1 boring ugly bad house only
8. Hardly 4-5 characters in the entire muvi, no crowd
9. All ppl r ugly though it is french muvi
10. I dont think u need a 10th reason not to see dat muv