Amour

Amour is about what happens when the passage of time rips your life a new one.  Georges (Jean-
Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are in their eighties.  They spent their long lives writing and teaching music.  Now they live their golden years leafing through the Sunday paper and keeping up with old pupils from within a spacious, tastefully apportioned Parisian apartment.  One day, over breakfast, Anne stares into space for several minutes, showing no sign that she is aware of the world around her.  The rest of the movie depicts her slow slide into bodily degeneration, mental collapse, and eventual death.

It’s harrowing drama as only the French can do it.  I occasionally wonder about the point of movies like this.  It’s not the kind of show people see to enjoy themselves or so they can chat about it the next day over toasted bagels in the break room.  It’s a realistic depiction of the aging process, which means that it’s slow, painful, and sometimes uncomfortable to watch, so why watch it?

Part of the reason, surely, is to appreciate the craft of the filmmakers involved.  Amour was directed by Michael Hanake, known for making movies full of uncomfortable silences pregnant with sadness and dread.  He’s unobtrusive here, moving the camera little, placing it close to or far away from his actors so as to maximize the effect of their performances.  Amour is, at base, a two-person show, and both actors do great work.  Emmanuelle Riva is particularly impressive, especially in later scenes when Anne has lost the ability to speak but uses her eyes to convey her anger over the situation in which she finds herself.  Trintignant gives a very subtle performance.  He never states outright how much his wife’s condition is affecting him, but we can tell in the offhand comments he makes to those who question him about it, in how to stoops to put together a specialized bed for his wife in their room, in how he stands over her as she gets worse and worse and worse and worse.

But excellent craft alone cannot be enough of a reason to put oneself through a wrenching watching experience such as this.  Perhaps people see a movie like Amour because they recognize their own situation in it.  I will admit that, while watching Amour, I had a hard time not thinking of my grandmother, who slipped, like Anne, deeper and deeper into disease until there was nothing left.  Different people can surely see their mothers, their wives, and their children in it, and might appreciate having a collective record of a subject about which few are willing to make a feature film.

And yet getting back in touch with memories of dying loved ones is painful in and of itself, so why do it?  I don’t know.  Maybe making and watching the movie are small acts of defiance against the process it depicts.  Amour opens with a squad of firefighters bursting into Georges and Anne’s apartment to find Anne’s body laid out on her bed, a shower of flower petals sprinkled around her.  We know she is going to die within the first minute of the movie, and still we watch the train come slowly down the tunnel, and stick around for the inevitable crunch.  Then we get to walk away.