Movie Review: A silence sublime pervades Haneke's 'Amour'

The 2012 French-language film “Amour” sounds suspiciously like it would fall in the Nicholas Sparks vein. 

 

The story about an elderly man taking care of his wife after she falls ill to a stroke, plus a French title that means “love,” also doesn't help. But filmmaker Michael Haneke's (2001's "The Piano Teacher") name on the poster is a reassuring signal that the movie isn't a sap-ridden sob story, despite a premise that could easily fall into sentimentality.

 

Haneke is an Austrian auteur known for his austere style. In “Amour” it reaches magnificent heights, as much through the direction as through the painfully pared-down yet transcendent performances of French screen legends Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva who play the elderly couple.  

“Amour” begins by revealing how it ends. The scene includes police officers searching a house, only to find the corpse of an old woman on one side of a double bed, arranged as though she were in a casket. Flowers are in her hands and petals scattered by her head. The image is fleeting, lasting only for one deep breath, but it is indelible all the same.

 

Such is the power of the opening scene that the audience is gripped by the image of a gray and wrinkled Ophelia but also lulled into a false sense of security. Since it begins at the end, we already know how the story turns out.

 

Every scene that proceeds thereafter is steeped in a quiet foreboding, the audience poised in anticipation of the big cataclysmic action that will set events into play and lead to the pre-imposed ending.

 

Georges and Anne are then introduced as a couple in their eighties, attending the concert of their former piano student. In these early scenes, they are a picturesque couple in their twilight years, living in a world of privileged comfort, easy tenderness and, again, love—the kind that comes only after long years of marriage.

 

It's a classy move when the film chooses not to stretch the suspense. It jumps right to the first sign of trouble. Anne and Georges return home from the concert to find that their home has been broken into, but the next morning the scene is as normal as ever, except that Anne suddenly falls catatonic in the middle of their shared breakfast. Georges does not panic, but is visibly shaken. It is revealed shortly after in a conversation between Georges and their daughter Eva that Anne had suffered a stroke.

 

From that point on, Anne descends into dementia and paralysis as she suffers from a failed surgery and a second stroke. Here we see Riva at her best. She manages to convey the despair of a woman whose own body is turning against her—a despair that somehow weighs heavier and grows louder the more silent and static Anne becomes. More importantly, she compels the viewer to look, to behold, as painful as it is to watch Anne’s bright eyes and warm smile gradually ebb away.

 

Trintignant, of course, is equally brilliant. The calmness of his Georges is frightening because his eyes reveal a desperation and frustration that grow parallel to Anne’s despair, and yet Trintignant’s earnest manner makes Georges’ devotion and love for his wife beyond doubt. When the final action happens, it needs no background music to mark it as the climax, no slow build-up, or fancy camera angles—its impact stems from Trintignant’s voice and his silences, the pauses of his own breath. He owns the scene, much like how his character in that moment decides to own his predicament and keep his promise to his ailing wife.

 

To say that the film is spare is an understatement. Nothing is grand or assaulting in this movie. Everything happens subtly, silently. The set is contained mostly within an elegant Paris apartment. There are only a handful of characters. Their conversations are minimal.

 

The heavy silences are filled, for the most part, not with elegant piano music as would befit the two main characters who are retired musicians, but with the mundane soundtrack of everyday life: doors opening and closing, running water, the heavy shuffle of aged feet, breath.

 

But this yawning absence of music, scenery, and bustle serves the film beautifully, and is perhaps what saves the story from being too gushy or cloyingly sweet. The silences heighten the tension of the film ever so subtly, create a foreboding atmosphere and, perhaps most importantly, enhance focus on the slow decay, the pain and, yes, the love quietly stirring beneath the aged eyes of the protagonists.

 

Therein lies the film's magic—it manages to haunt, to question, to settle in the brain and in the soul even without blatant spectacle or drama. It favors simplicity, silence, small moments, as if to say that these, and not the big, elaborate gestures, are what make and break a life.--KDM, GMA News

 

"Amour" was screened at the Cinemanila International Film Festival last Dec. 11.