Couples of a certain age – a demographic that’s seldom well-served by local cinemas – need to drop everything and head to the movies this week. At the multiplex, Hope Springs has Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones in a soft-centred but remarkably detailed depiction of a middle-aged marriage in crisis (think sitcom meets Bergman, with a hefty dash of therapy culture). Meanwhile, the invaluable Friends of the Cinema Society is halfway through a month of screenings dedicated to its late president Tasos Anastasiou (all profits go to the Anti-Leukemia Society): next week’s Moonrise Kingdom is whimsical, charming and the most loveable film of 2012 – but first here’s Amour, the tale of another older couple, winner of the Golden Palm at Cannes, most of the major European Film Awards (Best Film, Director, Actor and Actress) plus five Oscar nominations.
The director is Michael Haneke, known for bleak, rather steely dramas that specialise in confronting the middle-class audience with its guilty conscience – and the latent power of Amour comes from the sense of a stern, austere filmmaker slowly giving way to sentimentality. “None of that deserves to be shown,” says Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), referring to his wife Anne’s increasing decrepitude – and Haneke agrees, yet he shows it anyway. The subject is too big, too devastating; European arthouse restraint fights the stubborn spectre of mortality, and loses.
Georges and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are the kind of people who might go to a Haneke movie, maybe at the Parisian equivalent of the Friends of the Cinema Society. They’re cultured, intelligent, civilised. Retired music teachers in their eighties, they live in a tidy apartment block whose concierge obviously reveres them; they worry, in the abstract, about being burgled; they have a daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert), who lives abroad with her English husband, and two grandchildren whom we never see. Their life is comfortable and a little chilly, like the life of the couple being stalked in Haneke’s unnerving Caché – but a different kind of peril comes to stalk them. One morning, out of nowhere, Anne has a sudden attack, something like a stroke. For a couple of minutes she’s catatonic, dead to the world. Then she’s fine, and doesn’t remember anything – but the damage is done. Doctors say her carotid artery is blocked, and an operation is needed. The operation goes wrong, leaving her right side paralysed. Then she has a second stroke…
Almost all these things (except the initial attack) happen offscreen. We only see the effect they have on Anne, and of course the effect they have on Georges – a not especially giving man (“Sometimes you’re a monster,” says his wife gently) turned reluctant carer, and increasingly obsessive as the couple start to live in a kind of bubble (the creation of personal space, and its violation, has always been Haneke’s great theme). Anne, a dignified woman, hates what she’s becoming: “There’s no point in going on living,” she says simply. “I don’t want to carry on”. I won’t give away the ending, but in fact we know it from the very beginning – a startling, unexpected scene in which the fire brigade breaks down the door of the couple’s flat, smells gas in the air and finds an old lady’s corpse neatly laid out on the bed.
Some will call Amour depressing, and of course they have a point (though there’s nothing wrong with depressing per se). Others will say it’s a disease-of-the-week TV movie decked out in arty restraint, and they have a point as well. The second half is gruelling and a little one-note – and it does succumb to glib ‘movie moments’ when, for instance, Anne leafs through her old photo albums (“It’s beautiful,” she says; “What is?” asks Georges; “Life,” she replies simply), or when Haneke cuts straight from Anne being fitted with an adult diaper to a flashback of her playing, imperiously, at the piano. For all its acclaim, this is essentially a tearjerker. Get out your Hanekes.
Yet the director is still subtle when it matters. Amour seethes with nameless tension (Haneke’s speciality); a held-long shot of Anne – still relatively healthy – sitting in bed reading a book carries a sense of dread, as if she’s liable to collapse at any moment. Another scene turns out to be a dream sequence. The couple’s relationship is intimately observed without being obvious. Promise me you’ll never take me back to hospital, begs Anne – and Georges hems and haws, refusing to make such a promise, yet in fact makes the promise without actually saying so. They understand each other, in the manner of two people who’ve lived their whole lives together.
Early on in Amour, Georges tells Anne a story from his childhood (later, in the film’s most important scene, he tells another story). He once saw a film, he recalls, that moved him deeply; he was talking to another boy about it, and started telling him the plot – but reciting the plot rekindled the feelings he’d had while watching so that, much to his embarrassment, he burst into tears. Now, says Georges, decades later, he no longer remembers the other boy’s reaction; he doesn’t even remember the film – “But I remember the feelings”. Amour taps into deep, unforgettable feelings, and invokes them powerfully. For all its flaws, it’s a must-see. And not just for older couples.
DIRECTED BY Michael Haneke
STARRING Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert
France 2012 127 mins
In French, with Greek subtitles
