Amour review

Director: Michael Haneke
(2012)

Love is a complicated emotion to capture with a camera. The biggest failing in attempts to capture such an emotion is to be soppy, overly sentimental or just plain false. Very often, these efforts fall flat. But there aren’t many directors with the sheer talent of Michael Haneke. Aptly demonstrating his mastery of film, he has delivered the Palme d'Or winning masterpiece Amour, undoubtedly the finest film of 2012.

Opening with a group of firemen smashing down an apartment situated in Paris, Amour is a personal, engaging piece of art. The apartment under inspection belongs to Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), 2 retired music teachers living happily together in their old age. It’s immediately clear that the couple have a small amount of wealth; their home is spacious, complete with a baby grand piano in the living room. The comfort of their existence is shattered after Anne suffers an attack that renders her to the support of a wheelchair, as well as afflicting her with dementia. For the remainder of the film Georges cares for his beloved wife, trying to make her as comfortable as possible in what they both acknowledge as Anne’s final days.

Amour succeeds due to its heartfelt and genuine performances from these 2 experienced actors. Riva is physically constricted for a large portion of the film, but performs small miracles as she slowly disintegrates into a hollow shell of the woman she once was. Trintignant is even more impressive. While Georges isn’t a physically strong person, the way he himself struggles to help the person that he loves is utterly overwhelming to the emotions. Simply getting Anne from her wheelchair into bed is an arduous task; his struggles to lift her are expressed perfectly. He spends a great amount of the film caring for her needs, from cutting up her food into manageable portions to taking care of her toiletry needs. Seeing a man give everything he has to care for the woman that he truly loves was an utterly devastating experience to watch, made even more crushing by Haneke’s decision to make the outcome so plainly obvious.

This pure emotional attachment to the viewer is sentimental however, and is undoubtedly one of the finest achievements of the film. Nothing is forced, Haneke’s faith in both actors and script are integral to the real feelings that Amour strikes its audience with. The film has no soundtrack at all, and the only music that we hear is completely diagetic, further augmenting the raw power on display. Haneke further demonstrates his ability with a screenplay that excellently portrays the love between these 2 characters. He shows the history of the couple not through cheap montage but small scraps of dialogue. We learn of their jobs as music teachers when a former student comes to visit. The information we glean from this is slight, but does wonders at fleshing out the length and strength of their love.

The cinematography of Amour is easily some of the finest of the year so far. A great deal of the film is from a static camera, often capturing long takes at a time. Back and forth conversations are often captured this way, putting focus on the importance of that characters dialogue. While this almost perpetually static camera may sound like a boring decision, we get reset by a perfectly pitched pan, refreshing the scene completely. What's more impressive are the number of long takes and the tracking shots that usually accompany them. These flow perfectly, also showing the remarkable ability of both Trintignant and Riva, who stay in character flawlessly. The films climax consists of 1 shot, making for an utterly engrossing and mesmerising scene.

Amour is close to being a perfect film, marred so slightly by the rate in which Anne deteriorates. The films emotion is at its rawest when Georges and Anne are conversing about the life, both past and future. When her dementia takes a firm hold, she becomes a babbling mess, reverting to an almost childlike state. This in itself provokes such distressing emotions, but isn’t quite as powerful as the long conversations that are captured in long, unbroken takes. Other than this, Amour is a flawless work of art, easily the best film of 2012.

9