Hollywood Life Magazine

Asides

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  When you really love someone a lifetime it transcends every other kind of love. Romantic love gets nowhere near it. It’s a bond so strong, in fact, that nothing can deter you from doing what needs to be done for the one you love. You will endure any test put in front of you, gladly, for a few minutes with your beloved. If you’ve raised a child you know this. If you’ve watched a grandparent or parent die, you will know this. Because the simple fact of it is that life ends. We are born dying and the time we have right now is everything. We prepare to say goodbye to those we love most deeply, and that is where the agony of life lies. The agony of something so exquisitely beautiful — a thing that flies in your window like a tiny miracle, but can’t last, isn’t even meant to. How do we even make it through all of this loss. We make it through because of the connections we have to others.

  There wasn’t a dry eye in the Lumiere this morning for Michael Haneke’s absolutely brilliant Amour. No coughing, no walk-outs. The room was hushed as the film unfolded one incidental conversation at a time. This was a movie about people talking to each other. You’d think that a movie like that would be boring, but because you care so deeply about the people on screen, because you feel as though you’re living their life with them. Every tiny moment between them as a man cares for his wife who is slowly dying, feels precious, essential, like it can’t be skipped over.

  Written and directed by Haneke, this French film is probably headed straight for Oscar’s foreign language race where it will likely win. That is, unless some silly procedural error derails its chances. It will be, along with a few other films here in Cannes, one of the best films of the year. The film stars Jean-Louis Trintignant as Georges, and Emmanuelle Riva as his wife Anne. Isabelle Huppert plays their very busy daughter.

  The film opens with the couple returning from a film. A joke is made about how making love would be a nightmare for them now. Georges tells Anne how beautiful she looks. Life proceeds in its ordinary fashion, though there is no TV blaring in another room to fill the quiet. They wake up together, eat breakfast together, takes walks together, and genuinely enjoy one anothers company. Each listens intently to what the other is saying. It’s clear from the outset that what has held them so tightly together their whole lives is their deep friendship.

  One morning, Anne can’t speak to him. She simply stares into space blankly for several minutes before coming to. After that, it’s a slow decline. First, the left half of her body is paralyzed. Then she has a stroke and is bed-ridden. Through it all, Georges cares tenderly for her in a way you would only do for that person you loved beyond yourself. It’s really as simple as that. How much easier to have her put in a hospital where others could endure the humiliating moments of wetting herself and having to wear diapers, eating baby food. How easy to leave her nightly moaning to others to soothe or ignore. But Georges doesn’t. It has always been the two of them and he isn’t about to abandon her.

  Half of it is Georges’ duty as a husband and friend. But the other half is the more unbearable one — he can’t let her go. He is holding onto her because his life is nothing without her. As we watch this play out, it becomes clear where it’s headed. But that doesn’t make it any less moving. Haneke keeps the conversations driving the film with little of his usual visual flourish. It’s a film that will make you start thinking about the ones you love, and those you’ve lost.

  For me, my grandmother lived to be 97. My father was so close to her that he couldn’t let her go. He cared for her up until the point where she had to be hospitalized. He even opted for a feeding tube rather than let her die. He could not bear to see her leave. My last memories of her was of her lying in the bed, barely 70 pounds, with a tube stuck in her stomach. She was moaning in the same way Georges’ wife moaned. I couldn’t take away her pain. I wanted to run out of the room, to avoid the pain of it. That is probably the natural, cowardly reaction. How much braver to tough it out, to endure the pain of such an intimate, horrifying glimpse of a dying person.

  But of course, to be the one being cared for, to watch the one you love have to take care of you is probably even more painful. There doesn’t seem to be any way around it. You have to go through it. Georges does. He faces down death with clarity. They lived long, fulfilling lives together. They were lucky that way — lucky to have found each other, lucky to have had that life to share, all those casual meaningless conversations that mean the world when they cease. “You are sometimes a monster,” his wife says to him. “But you are kind.”

  Amour is a film about love and life and all of the tragedies and miracles we stumble upon while we’re here. A great artist can permanently change the lens on your vision. Haneke has done that here. He has taken an all-embracing word and explained it plainly, brilliantly with the same delicate magic of capturing a wild thing that has flown through your window. You don’t think you can do it, or that you should do it. But it doesn’t take long for the answer to become wholly clear — when the time comes to take a fleeting moment of control over an unwieldy universe.