Michael Haneke’s Amour is the ultimate horror film. With its portrayal of the shocks, the cruelties and indignities to which old age and disease subject a happily married Parisian couple, it’s far scarier and more disturbing than Hitchcock’s Psycho, Kubrick’s The Shining, or Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, and like those films, it stays with you long after you might have chosen to forget it. Like all of Haneke’s work, Amour raises interesting and perhaps unanswerable questions: Can a film be a masterpiece and still make you want to warn people not to see it? Can a movie make you think that an artist has done something extraordinary, original, extremely difficult—and yet you cannot imagine yourself uttering the words, “You’ve got to go see Amour”?
It’s hard not to appreciate the film’s extraordinary qualities. Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabelle Huppert deliver performances so convincing and delicately nuanced that we forget they are actors, let alone French movie stars; their ability to make us think we are watching real people is partly why the film is at once so impressive and so distressing. Every camera angle seems meticulously chosen, every scene artfully composed; every detail of costume and setting—a worn bathrobe, a pair of slippers, dresses hanging in a closet, the precise way that the piano is positioned in the living room, the “good” furniture so familiar that it has become almost invisible to its owners—is appropriate to the two elderly musicians whose travails we are watching; every exchange appears to have been written and shot with perfect confidence about precisely how much to conceal or reveal.
But Amour can be excruciating to watch. The film’s narrative arc is more or less clear from the opening scene, in which we see firemen bashing their way into a handsome, high-ceilinged, old-fashioned Paris apartment. The workers are visibly disturbed by a smell that turns out to come from the corpse of an old woman: nicely dressed, comfortably positioned in bed, her hair fixed, decked with flowers, all of it conveying the odd jauntiness one sometimes observes in Sicilian catacombs. Then, the action shifts back in time. An elderly couple attends the recital of a young pianist, the wife’s former student. Returning home, Georges and Anne notice that someone has crudely and unsuccessfully tried to force open the lock on their front door. Haneke has long been fascinated by the subject of home invasion; in his most notorious work, the 1997 Funny Games (remade a decade later in Hollywood), two vicious sadists force their way in and proceed to torture an upper-middle-class couple and their son. My favorite of his films, Caché(2005), considers the possibility that a mysterious, extended, and possibly malevolent home surveillance may be a more subtly destructive form of invasion: a highly effective psychological weapon. But Amour reminds us that the most dangerous intruders are the more common—indeed the unavoidable—ones: time and death.
One morning, over breakfast, Anne glazes over, impervious to Georges’s attempts to rouse her. She comes to, but without enough motor control to pour a cup of tea. In a characteristically masterly scene, Haneke persuades us—precisely rendering George’s initial terror, his relief, and then the alarming sight of the teapot shaking in Anne’s hand—that this is exactly how it would be if a formerly healthy loved one suddenly and helplessly sloshed tea all over the kitchen table.
An unsuccessful operation leaves Anne paralyzed on one side. The couple copes, with some difficulty, but with dignity and grace. Then Anne sustains another stroke, and the question arises of how much of her remains in the bed, drinking from a Sippy Cup and howling the same words over and over. As her mental and physical condition degenerates, we watch as the strain begins to unhinge Georges. The only break in his dreadful routine is provided by unsatisfying visits from the couple’s daughter, played by Isabelle Huppert. A musician, like her parents, the high-strung and harried Eva understandably prefers to focus on her own familiar discontents—an unfaithful husband, a troubled marriage—than to face what has become reality for her parents.
Alerted by the firemen’s break-in, we wait for the violence that we intuit will occur, though we don’t know when. And when at last it comes, it is a relief, both for the characters and the audience. That this violence is an act of love (among other emotions) may be part of what has inspired critics to talk about Amour as evidence that its director—known for his provocative, confrontational use of cinematic mayhem—has at last discovered the power of our more tender feelings. Amour, many critics have argued, is Haneke with a heart.
by Francine Prose, NYRB | Read more:
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics
