Michael Haneke's 'Amour': Love and death

You can tell we're an aging population by the geriatrically themed films cropping up of late: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Quartet and now Michael Haneke's Amour. The first two starred actresses in their late 70s, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, while Amour's Emmanuelle Riva is 85 and her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant only slightly younger.

Riva came to international attention in 1959 with a film by Alain Resnais whose title is, I think, not accidentally reflected to her new one. Hiroshima Mon Amour was one of the signature films of the French New Wave. Riva played a French actress who has come to make a film about peace in Hiroshima and is pursued, ultimately in vain, by a Japanese suitor whose come-on line, obsessively repeated, is "Tu me tue. Tu me faites de bien." ("You kill me. You do me good").

Obviously, something more than a casual interracial affair is at issue here, and Riva's character— she never discloses her name— conceals a traumatic past of her own. The film remains haunting after more than half a century for her superbly shaded performance, and for the debate it triggered over France's own collaborationist role in World War II.

Riva went on to a notable career in France, but few of her films were distributed in America. That she should make so utterly triumphant a return after all these years puts us in mind of what we still have but also of all that we've missed.

Mini-stroke

Her courageous and extraordinary performance in Amour is, happily, matched by Trintignant's no less remarkable one. His career has been better known than Riva's, and he has always been an intelligent actor even in less than memorable films. That intelligence frames Amour, because the film unfolds through his eyes, and its moral crux belongs to him.

Anne and Georges Laurent are retired musicians, and we see them early in the film, in virtually its only exterior scene, attending a packed piano recital by a successful pupil of Anne's. We follow them to their Parisian apartment, and follow the routine of a long-married couple who treat each other with the tender courtesy of the aged.

In the midst of an ordinary conversation, Anne suddenly becomes unresponsive. A blockage in her carotid artery has caused a mini-stroke, but an operation to relieve it fails. Death takes up residence.

Anne's experience of hospitalization is so traumatic that she begs Georges not to send her back under any circumstances— apparently, the American hospital, like so many of the norms of our capitalist culture, has now become universal. At first she is still lucid and mobile, but a major stroke paralyzes her right side, and successive ones rob her of her mind.

Caregiver's burden

Georges becomes a full-time caregiver, with some practical assistance from the landlord and his wife (definitely not the American norm). But as time goes on he requires nurses on shift. We see his life contract to the management of Anne's death, and we see her attempting to adapt, for as long and as well as she can, to her ever-diminished self.

These scenes are shot in long takes that elapse in real time, for time itself has taken on a new quality that is both agonizingly long and terrifying short: the experience of a present bereft of a future. This new time is in fact the music of the film, which otherwise has no score other than the snippets of Schubert the characters play or hear themselves.

It's a commonplace that the old retreat into the past as their future diminishes, but as Anne begins to lose her past— or, more frighteningly, her ability to communicate it— Georges is left with only the burden of his own. The caregiver's suffering, we come to see, is no less than the dying person's; their entwined lives are dying together, creating a void that no one else can enter.

Floral deathbed

Their middle-aged daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) sweeps in, offering nothing but the irrelevant distraction of her own life; Anne's pupil pays a courtesy call, but he too is now alien to their world. Dying, as we see through Georges and Anne's eyes, is a kingdom that forecloses any goal or activity but itself; this is what our days come to, and in their harsh light the business of the living is incongruous and faintly ridiculous. The only question is when and how death will occur, and what must be endured until then.

We know, or can infer the answer to this question, because we see Anne dressed on her deathbed as if for a wedding at the beginning of the film, surrounded by a chaplet of flowers. Firemen have broken into the deserted apartment, a violence that is repeated at the end as the film connects its long flashback to the present.

Modern death is a stalemate created by medicine. Death will win in the end, of course, but "natural" dying is now a relatively rare occurrence. How long, and at what cost, should one protract this stalemate, and to what purpose?

Medical ethics has no answer to this question, which of necessity varies from case to case. The dying person sometimes resolves the matter, whether by suicide or by refusing care.

Reciprocal process

Anne turns away from the spoon that Georges tries to feed her with, but is that a request to starve? Is it sufficient permission for Georges to stop trying to feed her, and is a caregiver so easily discharged from his obligations?

What Amour makes us understand is that dying is a reciprocal process, as delicate and intimate as love. In the case of Anne and Georges, it finds its resolution in a moment that's as shocking as it is, when considered, perfectly right.

Georges himself has begun to experience nightmares and hallucinations, perhaps the result of his intense strain. We know only that he has left the apartment and disappeared. Has he simply fled? Has he drowned himself? Is he wandering the streets somewhere?

Supreme compassion

Haneke finds an absolutely magical way to raise these questions to an altogether higher level; any literal answer would only lead to unbecoming speculation. Georges intends to honor Anne by leaving her as he does, and this departure is also his own final act. Of course she will decay, but what becomes of her body is no longer significant, just as what becomes of his own is insignificant too.

Morally speaking, they have died together, even if he doesn't carry out a literal act of suicide. What Haneke does is to give Georges a hallucination of Anne as she was before her strokes, leaving the apartment for some event and telling him to hurry after her and to remember his clothing. He passively obeys and follows her out the door.

This is really what provides symbolic closure for the film, and what makes any speculation about what has literally become of him otiose. No one looks for him, and the film ends with Eva sitting in the empty apartment, alone with the mystery of her parents' lives-— and, equally, of their deaths. The name of the film is Amour; at the end, it's a word we appreciate in a deeply enriched sense.

Amour is a cinematic poem without a single false beat. It's safe to say that it will be a classic. In the meantime, it deserves every honor the film industry can bestow, and it has already reaped most of them. For its protagonists, it's a triumphant coda to two distinguished careers in film. For Michael Haneke, a director who has been reproached for his coldness, it is a work of supreme compassion.