Amour (2012)

True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

For those who write, watching a film by Austrian auteur Michael Haneke requires preparation: sitting down, meditating for a moment, taking an impulse through a sigh and preparing to let yourself be carried away by an aesthetic pleasure that will also make you suffer: for its rawness, for its pessimism, for reproducing life, for making cruelty a poetry.

The word “love”, in any language, is difficult to define. In Spanish, for example, it has more than 14 different meanings, most of them imprecise. And, if this wasn’t enough, many times we want to distinguish between the different types of love that exist: towards parents, children, friends, to a country, to a supreme being, to oneself. But most of the time, the immediate identification of the word has to do with the partner, the loved one.

Haneke’s 2012 masterpiece Amour tells the story of Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), a couple in their 80s. Both are retired piano teachers who live in an austere apartment in Paris, decorated with sobriety and good taste. The film begins with a kind of prologue, in which a firefighter squad bursts into the apartment, inspects the place and discovers a corpse surrounded by flowers in the main room. Actually, from there, everything is told in flashback; the story keeps linearity in the structure, seasoned with dream sequences, a couple of brief interludes, and some emotional maneuvers of imagination.

We first see Georges and Anne attending a Schubert piano concert at the Theater des Champs-Élysées. At the end of the gala, they both go to the dressing room to congratulate the interpreter who used to be one of Anne’s students. They return home and find that the entrance has been forced. Someone tried to violate their most intimate space without succeeding, but the couple remains uneasy. Georges tries to comfort Anne, encouraging her not to let that episode overshadow the wonderful evening they had, “Did I already tell you that you look beautiful tonight?”, he ends, to lighten up the moment and reaffirm his devotion to her. When in bed later, he has problems falling asleep and, when he turns to see how her partner is doing, discovers Anne upright, staring blankly. He asks her what’s wrong, and she answers “Nothing”. The next morning, Anne is stuck with her eyes open but without conscience. When she finally comes back, she doesn’t remember anything and Georges thinks she’s making fun of him; realizing that this is not the case, he tells her that he will seek her doctor. She refuses. “We can’t pretend that nothing happened,” Georges says. At the end of this sequence, Haneke decides to insert an interlude which acts as an emotional repose and a vehicle for the transition of time, in the manner of a montage consisting of fixed, semi-dark shots of the different spaces that make up their house, corners that have witnessed, for years, the development of a solid love relationship.

In the following sequence, the daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert), arrives to visit her father. Anne is hospitalized and Georges informs her of the state she’s in, which is not promising. “We have always managed ourselves, your mother and I,” he points out. Before leaving, Eva tells him that upon entering the apartment, she remembered that as a child she used to listen to them make love, and how that, far from disturbing her, reaffirmed the idea that her parents loved each other and would always be together. When Anne returns from the hospital in a wheelchair and with partial paralysis of her face and body, she and Georges try to put their best face on misfortune. Anne is happy to return and she makes Georges promise that he will never, whatever happens, hospitalize her again. Anne will be largely dependent on Georges’ care, and he will have the responsibility of looking after her. Only an authentic love is capable of enduring such a circumstance. “Love demands supernatural tests”, as the Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges pointed out.

Haneke’s gaze, without being distracted by landscapes, focuses precisely on these two human beings locked in their space, in their world. With surgical fidelity, the Austrian filmmaker portrays the cruelty of the ups and downs in Anne’s healthcare. The good days bring hope, excitement, and encouragement. The bad days are impatient, depressing, and discouraging. Death, with that tenacious and intrusive shadow that it poses in the lives of the elderly and the sick – and which those of us who do not adjust to those circumstances tend to ignore, despite knowing of its omnipresence – displays its grotesque rituals on Georges and Anne. They are truly alone, him and her. Neither do they find refuge in God, nor do they seek his protection. It all lies in an emotional moment when the old woman wants to review and relive her life reconstructed from the fragments of a photo album “It’s beautiful,” says Anne. “What?” Georges asks him. “Life … Life is so long,” Anne decrees in one of those moments of lucidity that are increasingly scarce. The moments of memories and experiences start to disappear. Anne’s verbal coherence is fractured and her connection to the world is dissociated. Georges, in turn, loses patience. Anne tries to regain vitality through gestures of affection, she tries to recover experiences, to listen to music with Georges, which is a transcendental point of communion for them. But her resistance stands against the frustration caused by not being able to play the piano anymore, not being able to conduct herself, not being able to communicate properly. The daily physical and emotional resistance is suffocating and overwhelming.

Haneke takes absolute and powerful control of the environment in which he works, reaching peaks of perfection on a subject as complex and challenging as this one. No matter how prodigious Haneke’s talent may be, it would have been impossible for him to achieve this degree of sublimation if it weren’t for the prodigious performances of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva. There are many emotions, ideas, flavors and lights that this work opens in our brains. The story isn’t only about love; it’s about time, resistance, and fragility. A never ending experience.

by Octavio Carbajal González