Michael Haneke’s “Amour” is the painfully grim picture of Parisian octogenarians struck helpless as the wife suffers a series of strokes and tumbles into the purgatory of dementia, lost under a thick sheet of ice.
Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), the wife, was a piano teacher. In the first scenes, her eyes and spirit vibrate with light as she and her husband (Jean-Louis Trintignant) attend the concert of her former pupil. It’s at breakfast she has her first spell. Her eyes go vacant. I saw that vacancy in the eyes of my grandmothers. This film crushed me. Georges, the husband, cares for Anne every moment, feedings and diapers. Strain breaks him. Guilt shames him. He stretches his love over the widening chasm between himself and her.
Haneke has made a film about love and honor that defies, but cannot overcome an ultimate horror -- joyful love turned to torture as one half of a beautiful whole withers. No hope. Only an absence of help, cure, or god to end the misery. Our leads are amazing, creating a fully realized couple surrounded by an apartment brimming of a shared life. Riva was robbed a Best Actress Oscar. An exceptional work. A
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