Michael Haneke’s latest, that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this past May. It’s a powerful film about ageing, dying, and death—the most so one is likely to see on the subject—, and the love and commitment in a couple that accompanies this. And memories of a life lived. The film provokes discussion on a range of issues, notably on the question of euthanasia. With the exception of the opening scene it takes place entirely in a bourgeois Parisian apartment, with the lead characters played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva—age 81 and 85, respectively, in real life—, their daughter, played by Isabelle Huppert—who’s pushing 60 but looks several years younger—, and three or four passing characters. It’s an absorbing film, sad, and all too real for so many couples and families. Reviews in France have been dithyrambic, as could be expected. For US reviews, see here, here, and here. It opens in the UK in a couple of weeks, in the US next month.
Impressive movie – and I generally don’t like Haneke. The acting is especially wonderful.
On Haneke,’Caché’ was a very good film you will admit…
How to put it… Yes, Caché is a good movie, no doubt. I speak from very little experience: a few Haneke movies at best, including the utterly insufferable Funny Games. Caché is also painful to watch, like most Haneke’s movies. Its point (there is always one: bourgeois decadence, death, colonial guilt, etc) is also hammered in such a way that I quickly forgot the qualities of the film. I sympathize with the points Haneke makes in his movies, and find them formally brilliant – if I must be preached to, however, I prefer movies that play on a softer key.
Ultimately, there is the (rather childish, but what can I say?) idea that, in a world where evil stares us in the face every day, I like my moving pictures a bit more subtle, story-driven, entertaining. This makes me sound like a philistine, but there you have it.
“Amour” disappointed. I came prepared, even eager, to see a movie about the painful subject that “Amour” had the courage to treat.
It was wonderfully acted, nicely filmed, and brutally realistic.
But it was a bad movie.
In fact, it was barely a movie. Rather, it was a laborious exposition of a particularly painful way that people sometimes age, a situation that it laid out in a clinical but not in an artistic way.
It was as if someone set out to show how being poor sucks, and created a mise-en-scène that checked all the boxes to show how being poor sucks. It could be well-acted, well-filmed, and perfectly realistic, but still not be “a movie.”
“Amour” would have been more compelling had it probed more the dynamics between husband and wife, between parents and daughter, but these took a back seat to the meticulous, but often tedious, observation of the wife’s physical and mental decline.
Ricky: So you’re in the small minority of those who didn’t like the film http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm-188067/critiques/ That’s okay. I don’t share your take, needless to say. In lieu of offering my counterpoint to your point, here is the response to your critique by AS, sent by email
AS’s comments have helped me to understand and appreciate the last scenes of the film. But by then “Amour” had worn me down. I stand by my overall impression that it was not so much about their love or their marriage as it was a clinical dissection of a certain, very difficult type of aging within a certain familial context.
I disagree when AS when he says, “There is also a powerful story about a marriage that is an exclusionary bond: Isabelle’s Huppert’s character is no more than a witness to their life together.” I saw no powerful story there. I found the daughter a wholly unsympathetic character, absorbed if not débordée by her own life, with a philandering husband, children she was not close to, and financial worries. She is upset and indignant to find her mother in decline as if she has a right to her mother remaining as she once was unto eternity, but one senses no warmth on her part toward her parents. So whether her parents relationship is “exclusionary” as AS put it is not tested by their self-absorbed daughter.
P.S. While the scenes with the symbolic pigeon went on way too long (as did several other scenes), I liked the pigeon as a symbol of death insofar as the essence of birds is to flee in the presence of humans. That this pigeon struts around as if Georges is not even there was a nice evocation that he is a ghost or about to become one.
Here’s an essay on the film by Teju Cole in The New Yorker, 6 Jan. 2013 http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/01/age-actually.html