Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Last night, after watching Amour (2012), I was positively knackered.

I’d just spent two hours reeling from the blows inflicted by this unflinching story of an elderly couple dealing with the inevitable. I’d wept sharp, stinging tears of grief and had the air punched from my lungs. It left me weakened by a powerful catharsis, spent of all emotional reserves. I was a raw, flayed thing.

And I was exceedingly glad of it all.

The draw that got Amour onto my queue was Isabelle Huppert, an actor whom I have enjoyed watching in many other roles, but it turned out that in this movie, her role was quite secondary as the daughter of two elderly music teachers. Her performance was, as always, pitch perfect to the tone of the story, but she was not the star.

It was Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva who were the definitive stars of this film. I had seen their work in other films but only in supporting roles. Here, they were the story, bringing a harsh and bitter honesty to questions and situations many of us have already or may someday face.

The story is of Georges and Anne, two music teachers who, in their eighties, are enjoying a joint retirement in Paris. We meet them in as members of a concert audience where one of Anne’s students, now a professional pianist, is giving a recital. The following morning, during a humble breakfast, Anne loses awareness of her surroundings, which starts them both on a downward spiral towards Anne’s debilitation.

I am not familiar with the oeuvre of writer/director Michael Haneke, so I do not know if this movie is indicative of his style, but here, at least, his patient, quiet framing of each shot created an atmosphere that matched exactly the work of his primary actors. As a writer, Haneke is Spartan with his dialogue, and completely unpretentious. This emphasizes the contrast between the characters, as commonplace creatures with everyday lives, and the events, which are anything but mundane.

It sounds oxymoronic, but Trintignant and Riva brought what I can only describe as an intense stillness to their roles; they filled the silent pauses with unspoken questions–even deliberations–as they took their painful journey. With each long, unbroken gaze they captured the decades of marriage that preceded the opening action. Their history is barely alluded to, but we see its effects, both in their actions and in the way they interact with their daughter (Huppert) and others. Like many of their generation, they have drawn a partition between their private lives and their public façade, but by the time we see their weakest moments, we understand them well enough to completely empathize.

Had I screened this movie five years ago, I probably would not have felt the same about it as I do today. Back then, I did not have sufficient context to personally identify with the situations or the emotions that I saw played out. In recent years, though, my wife and I have lost three of our four parents, and several scenes resonated painfully with us as we relived moments from their passing. In addition, I am now of an age where I can perceive the approaching horizon of my own mortality; I know that I may be faced with similar situations as I grow older, and this brought an added poignancy to my experience.

For some, this movie may have a Reality Quotient that is too high, and it is, without doubt, a powerful set of performances about an exceptionally powerful subject. For younger folks, it may not have enough personal resonance to be worth the time, but for those of us on the second half of our wheel’s turn, I can only say: watch, feel, and think.

k