Amour (2012)
Certified: 16
Duration: 127 minutes
Directed by: Michael Haneke
Starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert, Alexandre Tharaud, William Shimell, Ramón Agirre, Rita Blanco, Carole Franck, Dinara Droukarova
KRS release
With five Academy Award nominations, 28 awards and 30 nominations from various film institutions under its belt, Amour makes its way gracefully onto local screens.
Their performances are guaranteed to give the film’s audience the equivalent of an emotional knockout
Michael Haneke, the Austrian director of 2009’s successful The White Ribbon, delivers a poignant and human drama in the French language.
The film acts as a window into a couple’s life and lets us viewers peek into their relationship. It provides us with a very close and intimate feel that is very hard to find in the usual Hollywood offering.
Amour is a definition of love that is highlighted by commitment in all its totality – the expression of love between a couple who are in their 80s.
The casting choice is an extra bonus. Emanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant had once been two of French cinema’s hottest stars. Take a look at Trintignant’s 1966 A Man and a Woman and Riva’s 1959 Hiroshima Mon Amour to get my drift. Hollywood saw these two actors as symbolising French cinema.
Their performances are guaranteed to give the film’s audience the equivalent of an emotional knockout.
The actors play Georges and Anne, a couple who are happy, live in their apartment in Paris and are still married to each other after decades. Anne is a former piano teacher and at one point, while seeing a former pupil achieving success, she suffers a stroke. She becomes dependent on her husband and in this dependency, the commitment between the two grows further and solidifies.
Their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) is not sure of her parents’ struggle to live independently. Georges clings to Anne and one questions whether he is clinging to Anne or to the memories he has of her.
Amour is both a sensitive, yet also harsh film. It is unique in its vision as it is not showing a relationship at the start of its path but at its end.
Haneke’s film is delineated by a sense of care and respect as he treats his actors with a strong hand. The discerning viewer will reap a lot of emotions from this well of experience and unique vision.
The path that this film travels may not be soft but it is honest and never opts for meaningless melodrama or easy tears. By the end, one may feel and understand that love is all about sacrifice; the rest is superfluous and never more than in this film is reality so evident.