Amour (2012)

Amour (2012)

Good lord. the pace of this movie was excruciating. I get that it was emotional, moving, and the entire idea very heartfelt. HOWEVER, it was sooooo long, and soooooo slow. I couldn't take it. After the first 40 min, I ended up watching the rest on slow fast forward. Oh you French movie lovers! How do you sit through these. sigh.

An intimate, delicate portrayal of an older couple and how the wife (Emmanuelle Riva) begins to fail in health, and how her husband (Jean-Louis Trinitgnant) struggles to keep up with her many needs and she slips further into depression and poor health. Director Michael Haneke has acquired the reputation of a director who is not afraid to pull out tricks out of his sleeve, and he does so here at one big moment, but ultimately this is a mostly straightforward, realistic look at getting older and the slippery slope keeping in good health becomes over time. It is a sad, somber, pretty slow-moving story, but one that needs to be in order to get the message across correctly. The twist that occurs is definitely unsettling, but also one that is not predictable at all given the nature of the story. It is a hard-hitting look at love and seeing someone die in front of you in a quick, alarming way, but it is all handled phenomenally well by a master behind the camera in Haneke.

[img]http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/user/icons/icon14.gif[/img] Watching Amour, is a lot like studying graphic images brought back from a war. It's painful to look at, but is so powerful and forceful in fleshing out your negative emotions that you find it difficult to look away. Michael Haneke has produced many tough watches in his time, but personally nothing compares to the experience of watching his latest. Amour is everything you expect from Haneke, minus the pretentious self amazement and needless moments of shock that have plagued some of his previous films like the remake of his "Funny Games". Led by terrific central performances and incredibly imaginative direction, he has crafted one of the most heart-wrenching films of the year. It was a pleasant surprise to see it on the Academy Awards best picture nomination list, but I am in ways glad it didn't win. I am about to attend my 75 year old grandmother's funeral, and with the deepest of respects, I can somewhat criticize Amour for it's questionable representation of the true meaning of love based on the horrible experience of witnessing my beautiful Nan's death. Perhaps it is because I am still in my youth, but I still failed to connect with this film like members of the past generations have. The main issue, is that I wasn't completely engaged with the brilliant performances. I thought long and hard about why, and I think it's because they had no cinematic heft. This is a film that questions the true meaning of love, that it does and does very efficiently, however we the audience become isolated from the characters, and only believe that Georges and Anne partnership is real. Without any form of sentiment towards us. The eventual death of Anne (this is addressed at the beginning of the film), does not have a harsher impact as Haneke intends to. The reason for that is his intention of keeping us in the dark about all this. Aside from that I think it is an absolutely spellbinding film, from the passionate performances to the visual spark, Haneke crafts a love story far off from our expectations of both this kind of film, and his previous work. He does it all without even the slightest of cinema sentiment, at the expense of engagement, but hey, better to have loved it with loss, than to never have loved it at all.

Amour Quotes

It's beautiful. Life. Long.

You don't have to hold my hand all the time. I can take care of myself, you know.

Things will go on as they have done up until now. They'll go from bad to worse. Things will go on, and then one day it will all be over.