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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The film beautiful trailer for the film.

 The beautiful piece that play's in the trailer and also in the movie.

Another beautiful Schubert piece that is played in the opening concert sequence of the film by Alexandre Tharaud.

Jean-Louis Trintignant in his youth.

Emmanuelle Riva in her youth.