Amour (2012)

This is the most optimistic film about death that I have ever seen.My feeling when it ended was "I don't feel afraid to grow old and die". The lack of sentimentality was such a relief, not that I was expecting a drama. No highs and lows, just a straight line, like death. But I never felt death surrounding the film. Rather, I felt that I was watching the early years of the couple, though they never appear in the film. Like I knew their whole life. There are not words for the two actors. I saw my parents in them,although they are completely different. And I saw myself in them. I was so touched by this film, in a unique, inexplicable way. I fell in love with the inevitability. I fell in love with growing old. And die. It made me feel safe somehow. The only drama I experienced through this film was "will I find true love?".

Fmovies: It's no surprise that Amour garners strong and polarized emotions from viewers. As both a director and writer, Haneke plumbs the dividing line - often the gulf - between what do and say, and what we feel. As someone about to turn the corner into what some consider to be old age, and perhaps overly daunted by the subject matter, it took me some time to build up the courage to watch this film. As a good friend said after he'd seen it, Amour is a film that you must see, but that you will probably only want, or need, to see once. But see it you must.

The genius of this film lies in the fact that it doesn't rely on any cheap cinematic or emotional shortcuts. We see this elderly couple for what they are: refined, often distant from one another and from their daughter and their star pupil, perhaps a bit smug, even snobbish. Their relationship is not the stuff of teary-eyed sentimentality.

For virtually the entire film we live with Georges and Anne in their comfortable but decidedly stuffy Paris apartment. The claustrophobia that they must feel, confined to a small space by Anne's deteriorating health, is reinforced by the fact that we never even see out their window, though the window does play a pivotal role in the film symbolic motif. Contrast that with another one of cinema's greatest apartment-bound films, Rear Window, in which we spend virtually all of our time looking out onto other people's lives. Here, we're forced to look relentlessly inward. We asked, in effect, to examine our own feelings towards love and death, to decide what we would do, how we would respond.

Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva give astonishingly restrained and sensitive performances. There are lengthy passages in this film in which they live their lives in utter silence, but what eloquence there is in that quietness. There is not a single false note, not a turn of the head, or a word of dialogue, that rings false.

Haneke has made three of my favourite films of all time - Cache, White Ribbon and now this. They couldn't be more different. Amour is the work of a true artist.

Amour (2012) is a French film written and directed by Michael Haneke.

This powerful drama is basically a two-person film. Emmanuelle Riva plays Anne, a retired piano teacher, and Jean-Louis Trintignant is Georges, her husband. This elderly couple are still healthy, independent, and financially secure. When one of them becomes sick, it sets off a chain of events that is grim, realistic, and disturbing for us to watch.

The film is basically a two-character tour de force. Riva and Trintignant are on the screen in almost every scene. Other characters enter and leave the apartment from time to time, but the movie revolves around the two leads. Both of them act so well that after a while you forget they're acting.

Incidentally, Isabelle Huppert, in a supporting role, plays Eva, their grown daughter. She's also a fine actor, but the film belongs to Riva and Trintignant.

We left the theater with the realization that we had witnessed a truly great film. However, I have to admit that we were shaken by the harsh and sad reality that was portrayed.

So, if you admire great cinema, this is the movie for you. If you're looking for a lighthearted romp about aging, choose a different film.

P.S. Amour actually starts in media res. It's important to see the pre-credit beginning of the movie. Be sure to arrive early so you don't miss that scene.

Amour fmovies. The retired piano players and teachers Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) live in a comfortable apartment in Paris. Their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) is a musician in tour through Europe. One day, Anne has a stroke that paralyzes her right side, and Georges nurses his wife and promises that he will send her neither to a hospital nor to a nursing home. Soon Anne's life deteriorates and her mental and physical capabilities decline very fast leading Georges to take a tragic decision.

"Amour" is a depressing movie about the end of a journey of a retired couple of about eighty and something years old. "Amour" has impressive performances of Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant and is developed in very slow pace, almost theatrically, and is sad to see the elder wife losing her dignity due to her physical and mental problems. I recall Emmanuelle Riva very young in movies like "Hiroshima, mon amour" or "Léon Morin, prêtre" and Jean-Louis Trintignant in the unforgettable "Un homme et une femme" or "Et Dieu... créa la femme" and seeing them now seniors make me think how short life is and made me sad. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Amor" ("Love")

According to Robert Sternberg's triangular theory, the paragon of love is "consummate"—complete, ideal, perfect. In this fashion of love, a couple delights in each other while defeating hardships with grace. Some might argue that aseptic concepts don't translate in the ebb and flow of reality; they would be right. Except Sternberg never said consummate was truly sustainable or permanent.

Amour surpasses consummate and escalates the inquiry; venturing into end-stage by showing us the bits that come before "death do us part".

When the movie begins, firemen break into a foul smelling apartment. A bedroom door, shut and sealed with layers of tape open to reveal the lifeless body of an old woman laid at rest. She was dressed in the finest, adorned with flowers. We are then introduced to main protagonists; ex-piano teachers Georges and Anne. Retired octogenarians with a long history of marriage who have settled comfortably into middle-class existence. The couple is shown attending a concert performed by one of their ex-students, and having a pleasant evening together—that was the last scene filmed outside their apartment.

On returning home, Georges discovers a tampered door lock. What appears to be a burglary attempt by strangers in the present, alludes to the change about to intrude at dawn.

At first consideration, Michael Haneke is an unlikely choice for stock sentimental genres. His blank, minimalistic, expressionless style of film-making; famous for detachment and cold neutrality would only aggravate the treatment of dry complex material. When one walks into a Haneken feature, expect neither theatrics nor emotions. Still shots, basic camera movements overlayed with monotonous ambient sounds only. But realistic mise en scène accentuates the intense deliberation demanded by his films (Caché, The White Ribbon). This is the principle behind those introspective pieces.

We are living in times of antipodal controversies. Pro-life campaigns against palliative medicine in the Liverpool Care Pathway saga is just one among the many that surround euthanasia debates. Rather than hanker over mission statements, Amour grazes the back door stance without overtly fixating on any specific message. And it would be perceptive to withhold from believing the central theme concerns itself with human rights because it doesn't.

This is a story about a common man and woman, what their romance is capable of enduring, and their burning departure from blessed peace. Amour makes observations behind mysterious doors; allowing you to watch as two human beings gradually abate into claustrophobic indignity. Tender, humane, poetic and heart rending.

cinemainterruptus.wordpress.com

The fact that Amour is an instant classic in the art-house world is as indisputable as the emotions presented by the protagonists of the film are bewildering. This picture is Haneke's minimalistic yet mightily expressive homage to love as we know it, showing the feeling's overpowering force and heartfelt, altruistic nature. While remaining a thoroughly unsentimental and provocative picture, Amour delivers a most-demanding portrayal of an elderly couple's last days together. Those cultivated, sophisticated characters need to evaluate their long-lasting marriage and come to terms with their own emotions, and, simultaneously, discover the true meaning of love in itself. Decisions need to be made, and some of them might be shocking to say the least.

It's a beautiful but considerable piece of filmmaking, where a sombre atmosphere and touching yet disturbing imagery permeate every scene. Haneke's steady and visionary directorial hand promises many moving and heartbreaking sequences, while still providing a poetic exemplification of a well- lived life's concluding moments. It's impossible to find neither a plausible sense of redemption nor an authentic touch of consolation, no. The film displays a marvelous character-driven narrative, where loving individuals diverge from the seemingly familiar path and start arguing with their own opinions and ideals, leading to some truly perplexing choices. In the most unexpected manner Amour touches the controversial topic of euthanasia, emphatically depicting how difficult it might seem to even consider such a harsh decision.

Amour is a tender, scrupulous, demanding, two-hour visualization of a romance well beyond boundaries, and through its difficult notions it shows human existence in its most intimate and most elegiac state. That death seems inevitable from the very first minutes is certain, but the way Haneke chooses in order to finally arrive at this intensely upsetting conclusion is an uneasy one. Amour is definitely a cinematic powerhouse, which will leave the audiences in a most pensive, quiet - even downcast - mood, still astounding with its ubiquitous beauty.