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Amour (2012)
Director: Michael Haneke
Rotten Tomatoes: 93%
IMDB: 7.8/10
Winner: Palme D'or, Festival de Cannes 2012
Oscar Nominations: Best picture, best director, best actress, best original screenplay.
5 star ratings from 25 different raters listed on the DVD cover
I think these are the theatrical posters:
I finally got around to watching Amour, the 2012 film from French-Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke that I have heard is a masterpiece from several independent sources. It lived up to its reputation, though I still got to appreciate it since I managed to watch it without actually knowing what it was about beforehand.
Amour, for those of you who don't know, is a French language word which my DVD translates as "love". That's only partially correct, it can also mean "beloved", as "mon amour" translates as "my beloved", the French word amour can be used as both a verb (e.g. Je' t'aime) and a noun. The movie itself is a journey about what one man, Georges Laurent (Jean-Louis Trintignant), is willing and not willing to do as his love, Anne Laurent (Emmanuelle Riva) first suffers a stroke which nearly completely paralyses half her body, and later, another stroke, putting her on an inevitable path to death. Whereas the first stroke took her body, the second stroke took her mind.
The scene shown in the two posters above is that of the first stroke. George is holding Anne trying to get her attention, and she's unresponsive, he then thinks she's playing a prank. We see him care for her and worried for her when the stroke starts (first image), and we see her unresponsive (second image).
This is very much a movie that Hollywood would never make, it's a movie about how miserable dying is, for both the person dying and those taking care of her. It's such a painful experience that only love could motivate one to do it, but love is also what makes it painful. I recognised a lot of these developments from my late father's prostate cancer, and thus I'm sure that Haneke (who also wrote the screenplay) had experience taking care of someone dying.
There's the whole 1 step forward, 2 steps back of the process, where improvement is made in one regard while other parts slip. We see George help Anne with her leg exercises, doing repetitions, but at the same time her face is shown to gross worse, more lifeless. We see George struggle to feed Anne, he can get a couple spoons of gruel down, but no more, with each spoonful a struggle. As Anne deteriorates, her lucidity worsens, she first stops speaking in full sentences, and later, she starts screaming out for her mother, as many people on their death bed do, reverting to how they were as a three year old. It's not a behaviour that anybody would guess if they had never seen anybody die as it's counter-intuitive, and I suspect that they would not empathise if shown it in a movie either.
This is a very good film, I recommend it if you've ever dealt with a relative slowly dying. Otherwise, I suspect you won't be able to follow the psychology, as this is a very focused film and doesn't touch on much of anything else.
Two additional, miscellaneous comments:
1) I had heard prior to watching this movie that it was misanthropic. I don't get the criticism, how is it misanthropic?
2) As I'm bilingual and with limited hearing, I had a hard time watching a French-language film with English-language subtitles, it's confusing to have the subtitles in a different language as the dialogue when I can follow the dialogue. I would have preferred if French subtitles were included, but for some reason they never include those in French-language films, only in English-language films.
Director: Michael Haneke
Rotten Tomatoes: 93%
IMDB: 7.8/10
Winner: Palme D'or, Festival de Cannes 2012
Oscar Nominations: Best picture, best director, best actress, best original screenplay.
5 star ratings from 25 different raters listed on the DVD cover
I think these are the theatrical posters:
I finally got around to watching Amour, the 2012 film from French-Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke that I have heard is a masterpiece from several independent sources. It lived up to its reputation, though I still got to appreciate it since I managed to watch it without actually knowing what it was about beforehand.
Amour, for those of you who don't know, is a French language word which my DVD translates as "love". That's only partially correct, it can also mean "beloved", as "mon amour" translates as "my beloved", the French word amour can be used as both a verb (e.g. Je' t'aime) and a noun. The movie itself is a journey about what one man, Georges Laurent (Jean-Louis Trintignant), is willing and not willing to do as his love, Anne Laurent (Emmanuelle Riva) first suffers a stroke which nearly completely paralyses half her body, and later, another stroke, putting her on an inevitable path to death. Whereas the first stroke took her body, the second stroke took her mind.
The scene shown in the two posters above is that of the first stroke. George is holding Anne trying to get her attention, and she's unresponsive, he then thinks she's playing a prank. We see him care for her and worried for her when the stroke starts (first image), and we see her unresponsive (second image).
This is very much a movie that Hollywood would never make, it's a movie about how miserable dying is, for both the person dying and those taking care of her. It's such a painful experience that only love could motivate one to do it, but love is also what makes it painful. I recognised a lot of these developments from my late father's prostate cancer, and thus I'm sure that Haneke (who also wrote the screenplay) had experience taking care of someone dying.
There's the whole 1 step forward, 2 steps back of the process, where improvement is made in one regard while other parts slip. We see George help Anne with her leg exercises, doing repetitions, but at the same time her face is shown to gross worse, more lifeless. We see George struggle to feed Anne, he can get a couple spoons of gruel down, but no more, with each spoonful a struggle. As Anne deteriorates, her lucidity worsens, she first stops speaking in full sentences, and later, she starts screaming out for her mother, as many people on their death bed do, reverting to how they were as a three year old. It's not a behaviour that anybody would guess if they had never seen anybody die as it's counter-intuitive, and I suspect that they would not empathise if shown it in a movie either.
The movie ends in a way I wasn't expecting, due to my Hollywood sensibilities. George tells Anne a childhood story to calm her down one night when she is agitated. Following this, he smothers her with his pillow. The same love which drove him to take care of her so attentively also drove him to so much pain that he gave up. It's not entirely surprising as I've heard of families going insane on their family in hospitals. This followed up on a scene earlier in the movie when George slapped Anne, he apologised and felt bad afterward, but that was a way of noting the beginning of his descent.
This is a very good film, I recommend it if you've ever dealt with a relative slowly dying. Otherwise, I suspect you won't be able to follow the psychology, as this is a very focused film and doesn't touch on much of anything else.
Two additional, miscellaneous comments:
1) I had heard prior to watching this movie that it was misanthropic. I don't get the criticism, how is it misanthropic?
2) As I'm bilingual and with limited hearing, I had a hard time watching a French-language film with English-language subtitles, it's confusing to have the subtitles in a different language as the dialogue when I can follow the dialogue. I would have preferred if French subtitles were included, but for some reason they never include those in French-language films, only in English-language films.
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#TeamASeparation
I know, I know. Amour is one of the few films that manages to piss me off...if the ending took a different route maybe I wouldn't be too harsh about it but yeah... #TeamASeparation Loved that movie. 
