Amour (2012)

Some directors have a fabulous insight into film as a form of art where every new topic requires a re-thinking of what it means to craft moving images. Haneke is one of these directors. I would grant him this, even though some of his films choose a remarkably skewed angle of what it is to be human. In Amour, however, Haneke has left some of his cynical attitude behind. The title contains no irony. This is actually a film about love. And what a film! I remember a Finnish-Swedish reviewer writing that most films revolve around themes that do not really concern us that much: space trips, and what not. Amour is about something we all experience, something that we all have to deal with, something that we all have to think about: death.

It's not a flawless film, but Haneke's study of a married couple who grapple with sickness is powerful and moving. He shows their tender interaction, their day-to-day life where the husband tends to the wife, whose illness quickly gets worse, and how he interacts with their slightly alienated daughter (icy performance by a great Isabelle Huppert). Hanake confines the story to their serene, but clearly lived-in apartment (everyday objects are often focused on: a chair, a piece of clothing, a cup). The world outside is reduced to sounds, a hallway (in which an imporant and uncanny dream sequence takes place) and two birds. And, importantly, in one of the very first scenes, we see the couple arriving home after a night out. They notice that somebody has tried to force open the lock of the door. The story is pretty clear from the get-go. The progression is clear. After her first stroke (the second one is not shown) the wife is operated, and is half-paralyzed. The man bathes, feeds, talks to his wife. A nurse comes to look after the woman, but the man accuses her for mistreatment. The man does what he can as his wife gradually slips away from him, but sometimes we see signs of life as they are able to sing together, or repeat words - here, Haneke makes clear how small things matter, how life is also the ability to drink a cup of water, or respond to touch, or the traquilizing effect of words. The film follows the dread the man goes through as he decides what must be done. This is shown without sentimentality. It is hard to watch - the nakedness of the scenes, the intimacy, is something I rarely see, and this makes Amour different from a run-of-the-mill sickness drama. Intimacy, here, shifts from being distressing to being beautiful, and here Haneke, as he always does, confronts me with the important question of what it means to see, to look, or to look away, or to suspect that one sees too much, or that one shouldn't look, that this is something between two people and not for others to see (what does it mean to watch the decline of a human being.

Here I also disagree with one disgruntled reviewer: the film is not, as I see it, a story about how love is tested. No - there is no question here whether the man loves his wife. In the film, it is evident that these people have lived an entire life together, and that it is impossible to undertand what we see in the film without acknowledging this temporal dimension, which we do not see directly. What we do so however is that the husband sometimes fall from love, that he grows to be more and more unhinged, how he shows remorse, and sadness, but this is all one aspect of love. This was, in my opinion, the strength of the film - it is a work of art that actually believes in love. At the same time, it does not make the two main characters perfect, or particularly likeable. They are sometimes cruel, or self-indulgent. In this way, the film conjures up an absolute perspective without being black-and-white. Also - I wouldn't say that the film is mainly a way to desperately elicit a particular emotional response from the viewer. I never felt the way von Trier's Dancer in the dark made me feel, that emotions are isolated from any context, so that I respond in a way that I have a hard time relating to, or articulating - in other words, in the one case, I felt manipulated, and in the other case, I didn't, even though I did respond strongly to it, and found it hard to watch at times.

There are some scenes I wasn't sure what to make of, the scene involving the pigeon towards the very end being one of them. Here, Haneke leaves things open in a way that has an impact on the entire interpretation of the film, and this is, I would argue, an example of weak judgment on his part. The scene is very Haneke, and it shows an aspect of Haneke's art I have problems with: whereas a sense of openness in how we can understand something works to a great effect in other places of the film, here it feels that the openness is more teasing, or provocative, than thoughtful. Here I had a feeling that my imagination is tested in a way I would not like it to be tested or, let's put it like this, Haneke introduces hints of possibilities I would not like to go to far into, but it is hard not to.

But, all in all, a great film, impressive acting and meticulous and elegant cinematography (how sterile, or unsettling, white light floods the apartment - sunlight is rarely seen.).