AMOUR

In which the titular sensation/concept/process renews between octogenarian musicians (Jean Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) while the fairer rapidly fails.  The subject matter of last year’s Palme d’Or would tempt you to believe that in the oeuvre of Michael Haneke, it’s an evolution, or at least a digression, into something warm and reasonably generous.  But no: this is a Haneke film from long-take to meticulously composed long-take.  Even the close-ups keep their Brechtian distance, and a specter of menace hovers over each and every frame.  Save for a rather brilliant extreme long shot that obscures the couple in a crowd of concertgoers, Amour takes place entirely in their Parisian flat, and in a way it’s a spiritual successor to Roman Polanski’s "Apartment Trilogy" (particularly during Georges’ bait-and-switch nightmare sequence).  What separates Amour from Repulsion is its austerity; that, accompanying a bleak moral vision, serves as Haneke’s distinct authorial signature.  The tenacity of its application – even the title cards are bare-bones, and non-diegetic music is nonexistent – suggests that avoiding emotional shortcuts is a matter of ethical, and not merely formal, concern for the Austrian director.  The idea is that none of lesser cinema’s palliative tactics get between us and Georges and Anne as Anne is claimed slowly but surely by the ravages of carotid blockage.  But affectlessness is, alas, just another affect.  Haneke might insist that he’s simply recording Anne’s suffering, but you could just as easily say that he’s lingering on it, and what results, as Slant’s Calum Marsh aptly observes, is body horror: Cronenberg’s The Fly with all the decay but none of the sci-fi.  Hence the aforementioned menace. 

The thing is, I’m not sure this isn’t appropriate.  If the point of Amour is that getting old is terrifying, then point very well-taken; Anne’s struggle to speak after her second stroke and descent, eventually, into unending agony, is as haptic as it is heartbreaking.  I’m willing to believe that’s exactly what Haneke wants.  I’m also willing to believe his excruciating images are meant to be metonymic: armed with scant backstory scattered carefully throughout, and our own familiarity with Trintignant and Riva – the quiet triumph of the initial crowd scene is that our eyes are drawn immediately to them, without formal encouragement – we’re free to extrapolate emotionally on our own.  I’m sure this is how Amour worked for its many admirers, who credit it with a wide breadth of feeling.  Indeed, certain details – how Georges helping Anne out of her wheelchair or off the toilet is staged as an awkward slow dance, for example – continue to haunt me, probably specifically because the film’s enigmatic quality opens them to my projections.  But they’re calculated enigmas, Haneke’s high art method of fleshing out his relentlessness.  As I said, I don’t necessarily find that relentlessness uncalled for.  Nor, however, do I find it terribly enriching.