Review: Amour

A loving elderly couple (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) are faced with having to deal with the deteriorating health of the latter (A stroke and a descent into dementia). Trintignant wants to keep her home to go through this with whatever dignity is possible. Their daughter Isabelle Huppert disagrees but lives abroad and thus comes in and out infrequently without putting up too much of a fight.

 

This 2012 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner is an odd choice for writer/director Michael Haneke (the notorious “Funny Games” and “The Piano Teacher”) to have made. It’s well-done up to a certain point, but I believe Haneke goes a step too far in going for realism here. I’ve always believed that even realistic films should be just a tad shy of total realism (and I’m talking about fictional films here, docos are a totally different subject and out of the equation), and Haneke slightly crosses over the line on this one. At what point does showing someone going through the undignified process of dying and dementia stop being accurate and start being simply undignified and unnecessary? I don’t think you need to show absolutely everything in order to get the reality of a situation across (Especially to anyone for whom this material will be somewhat familiar to one’s own reality, as it was for me). Some will disagree and that’s fine, but a little bit of sentimentality or a slight pullback from reality isn’t necessarily a bad thing in fictional cinema if you ask me.

 

I also found it odd that an 80 odd year-old was being left to look after another 80 odd year old with minimal assistance. That was the one break from reality to me (it has certainly not been true from my own experiences with elderly family members), as the Isabelle Huppert character just seemed unrealistically negligent and unlikeable. Sure, the old man refuses to accept hospice care for his wife (and can be quite hostile himself- but with reason), but surely the daughter should be insisting, being far more firm about it than she is. But that’s a minor complaint to be honest. I wanted to like this film more than I did, but I felt, even being fiction, this was exploitative (not to mention hardly anything new). Not quite on the level of “Precious” where it was unbearable, and this is a better film than that, but for a film featuring two characters who want to save others from witnessing the indignity of death, it felt strange that Haneke wanted the audience to see it. That’s a shame, because the central relationship, lead performance by Jean-Louis Trintignant (who is better than Oscar-nominated co-star Emmanuelle Riva if you ask me. She must’ve gotten the nom for having her arm tied up), and themes all have merit.

 

I don’t necessarily morally disagree with what happens near the end, but that doesn’t mean I needed to see it, either. When a filmmaker heaps on too much misery, I’m afraid I have a tendency to reject it somewhat. This is a good film and the central relationship is mostly lovely, but it could’ve been an even better one with a little more restraint. The final two minutes or so could’ve stood to be made a lot clearer, too. I’m cool with being left to fend for myself a bit, but that really was a bit of a head-scratcher to me (I’ve subsequently got a pretty good idea of what Haneke was getting at, but really only after reading others’ views on it).

 

I appreciate a desire to not over-sentimentalise something, but Mr. Haneke just seems a bit too unsentimental for this material, and his ultra-realistic, grim approach stops the film from being all that it could be (though it’s also not much in terms of plot, either really). Trintignant is heartbreaking, but being realistic doesn’t mean you’re being profound. I hate to be the ‘cinema is escapism’ guy, but that guy does have a point.

 

Rating: B-