Georges is a musicologist, it seems; Anne is a piano teacher; they’re a long-married couple, they’re retired; they listen to music, read, attend concerts, are in tenuous touch with their grown daughter, also a classical musician. Not a hair or an opinion is out of place—the characters just rumpled and informal enough not to seem stuffy. If there were a “Leave It to Beaver” or “Brady Bunch” for refined and cultured Parisians, these would be them, and they’re enough to make a classical-music lover want to give Snooki free rein in their spare bedroom. (Unless the story evokes an “Intouchables”-style visitor from the banlieue who would come to dinner.) They’re not just living outside time—they’re living outside life, living in that place that exists only in a French screenplay for movies that advertise the French “cultural exception” to the nation and the world.
They may be closed off to the world, but the world somehow impinges: first, in a cheap and irrelevant symbol, someone tries to break into their apartment. But it’s just crime, no novelty and no special version of modern times, just a sign that their well-ordered existence is threatened from without. The absolute absence of anger and of politics from their response—the wife’s fear, the husband’s desire to get the door fixed in order not to attract copycats—is exemplary of the bland goodness and almost unearthly decency of this model couple, who seem like living counter-arguments to Rousseau’s notion that artistic culture doesn’t entail moral virtue. The director, Michael Haneke, fashions their accomplished refinement (Anne is presented as the teacher of the real-life pianist Alexandre Tharaud, who appears and performs in the film) to give the film an air of righteous dignity. They don't utter a single sordid or sour word, or, it seems, even think one—though who would know? Haneke stays (with a few signal and fake exceptions) resolutely outside their minds, filming the exterior details of their lives with a repressed, even a constipated style—mainly static frames from a reserved middle distance, holding in emotion as well as information, keeping from viewers what he knows about the characters and what the characters know about themselves.
This retentive realism is a dominant mode of so-called art-house filming; it characterizes such movies as Christian Petzold’s “Barbara,” Cristi Puiu’s “Aurora,” Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,” and many other recently acclaimed movies. And it is as much a style of script and of narrative construction as of image-making. It doesn’t always have the same implications; in “Barbara,” it’s a mere elegance that dresses a potboiling story in the austere and streamlined chic fashions of a gentrified cinema; in “Aurora,” it represents political and sociological intentions. In Haneke’s film, the style is the premise for the setup: the willful exclusion of the characters’ inner life (yes, there is a dream sequence and a brief fantasy—both generic) throws the burden of interpretation on viewers. It’s Haneke’s usual strategy: to make viewers complicit with morally dubious deeds while keeping his own hands resolutely clean.
Here, the dubious deed (which is a shock but no surprise, since it’s suggested in the opening scene, from which the rest of the movie is a flashback) is a killing. What actually intrudes upon the couple’s well-ordered life is Anne’s illness—a brief blanking-out that heralds calamity to come. She is, so to speak, threatened from within—diagnosed with a blocked carotid; the surgery fails, she’s left paralyzed on one side and wheelchair-bound, and returns home to Georges’s loving care. But things take a turn for the worse, she can barely move and barely speak, and—having extracted from Georges the promise that he’ll never return her to the hospital—now hints, with a beseeching look, that she’s ready to die and wishes he’d let her do so.
A spoiler follows, though, by now, what Georges does is familiar news (just Google “Amour Haneke euthanasia”). I don’t doubt Haneke’s sincerity when he affirms in interviews the personal and compassionate roots of the story—the sufferings of his ninety-two-year-old aunt, who had wanted him to help her commit suicide. But what comes off onscreen is the filmmaking’s smirking pleasure at depicting, with a chilling explicitness, a heinously affirmative killing—a peculiarly active variety of euthanasia.
In doing so, Haneke lined his dominoes up perfectly. First, he constructed characters whose bonds of love seem incontrovertible, so that Georges couldn’t be accused of mixed motives. Second, he made this characters seem, angelic, so that there’s no trace of perversity or caprice on Anne’s part, no selfishness or cruelty on Georges’s. Third, he cast soulful actors, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, to play the couple.
Here’s Riva, interviewed in Libération by Anne Diatkine:
Here’s Trintignant, in a joint interview with Riva by Thomas Baurez, from L’Express, speaking of Haneke’s script:
If only some of the uninhibitedly energetic thought and insight of these actors had found its way into Haneke’s movie. Instead, the director films his elderly couple with a superficial simulacrum of wisdom and experience, strips them of traits in order to reduce them to the function of the film to render the appalling act justifiable, to strip out the appearance of mixed emotions. And yet, what comes through is that Haneke likes filming a killing, takes a smirkingly ghoulish look at the act, and takes unconscious pleasure in the unconscionable. As Georges smothers the incapacitated Anne under a pillow, her legs kick in resistance: she may be willing to die, but that doesn’t mean she’s ready to stop living. Nothing in Georges’s demeanor suggests anything but the desire to end Anne’s misery, in defiance of any objection the world might make. How he faces that opprobrium, or the force of law, we can only imagine. Haneke either knows and doesn’t show it, or doesn’t bother to imagine it; but, for him, it doesn’t matter. He has had his fun. He has shown murder and made his viewers love it, has brought them into complicity with his smirkingly ghoulish pleasure. The hollowness of the contrivance conceals the grotesquerie of the sacralized Grand Guignol. Where “Django Unchained” suggests Quentin Tarantino’s unconscious delight in the unconscionable “Amour” reflects Haneke’s calculated desire to stir up a reaction by way of a cynical ambiguity, to recalibrate a moral shock with an overwhelming preponderance of mitigations.
Would the ostensible mercy killing appear less justified if the couple were longtime fans of yé-yé or Plastic Bertrand rather than Schubert, if they casually flung political opinions of any stripe, if they confided in friends, if their discussions with doctors were observed—in short, if they seemed to live anything other than a life of hermetic perfection? The vision of marital love in “This Is 40” is vastly more complex; the vision of the political, historical, moral, and emotional volcano underlying dignified artistic urbanity is much deeper in Miguel Gomes’s “Tabu.” In “Amour,” there is one cinematic coup that lives in memory: the dance-like, erotic embrace that’s held in long shot as Georges raises Anne from the wheelchair and moves her across the room. It’s a grand moment of acting, well-conceived by Haneke—although it, too, is emptied out by its isolation, which reduced the embrace to a flimsy symbol of the couple’s erotic bond transferred into another sort of physical devotion.
The subject of “Amour” is powerful and true; the decline and degradation, through illness, of a spouse, a close relative, or a friend, is among the agonies of modernity, as sophisticated medical care extends the duration of life even at the price of extended suffering, preserves the body even as the soul seems to slip away—and those closest to the patient find that their role in his or her care shifts from beholding the agony to abetting it. That’s what makes Haneke’s rigid contrivances—the pristinely repressed and filtered script and images, the directorial straight face held with iron bands to suppress laughter—all the more repellent.
Photograph: Films du Losange/Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.
