As you may (or not) have inferred from its title, Michael Haneke’s film is about Amour. That’s not the L’amour that Chevalier serenaded mercilessly or that we hotly looked to the French cinemah to provide our becensored souls in the 50s and 60s. Those films celebrated beautiful free lovers like Emmanuelle Riva (Hiroshima Mon Amour) and Jean-Louis Trintignant (And God Created Woman, A Man and a Woman). Here those fine actors are Anne and Georges Laurent, octogenarians in full crumble.
The pre-title prologue shows Anne dead, decaying, but sensitively laid out, in a fine black dress, with an Ophelia scattering of white flowers, all snipped from their stems. To preserve her from embarrassing scrutiny for as long as possible and perhaps from embalming, Georges has locked and sealed her bedroom. Having begun with the end, the film then shows how it came to be.
The film proper opens with a crowd gathering for a concert. We spot the principals in the middle, comfortable to be out, chatting animatedly. As that crowd is welcomed to the entertainment so are we, but as the audience in the film faces us the question is who is watching whom? The film reflects us. As the couple is our mirror we see them through a mirror in the intermission bar. Now, we used to go to French films to see love stories we could never live. Here Haneke gives us the love story we may well live out -- if we’re lucky enough to last long enough for that suffering and even more lucky to have such a loving mate. So this isn’t the l’amour of young love but the profound and more realistic amour of the old. The casting of such romantic icons in the central roles enforces that distinction.
Unlike the syrupy scores of l’amour films, too, here there is no soundtrack music to key or to amplify our emotions. The few bars of music we hear -- usually doleful strings -- are rooted within the scene -- the concert, the visiting pianist, the CDs. This film feels less like a film than an admission into a real relationship. Because its focus is on the couple’s interior lives the film -- once in -- doesn’t leave their flat.
Everything in the film defines the nobility of the old couple’s love. Their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) puts up with her husband Geoff’s (William Shimell) infidelities. But they’re well matched -- though more basely than her parents are. “How much will the nurse cost?” Geoff asks Georges. Eva babbles on about real estate investments to Anne’s anguish.
The visit by Anne’s prize student Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud) shows that Anne used to be -- as she describes Georges -- capable of seeming like a monster but very gentle and generous. After Alexandre plays the bagatelle Anne requested, she dances a bagatelle in her new wheelchair, briefly reanimated by her student’s visit. Such is the restorative power -- and ultimate futility -- of culture, especially the high culture of the characters’ music, art, reading, conversation. Rare for Haneke, this film is devoid of the mass media, with the exception of a brief newspaper citation of another mercurial relationship, that between Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and US President Obama. The insensitive nurse who painfully brushes Anne’s hair and tries to force the mirror on her contrasts to Georges' respect for Anne and his refusal to expose and humiliate her, a care quite beyond their daughter.
The more explicit disintegration is Anne’s. First she has a brief blackout. When the operation fails she is paralyzed on her right side. That leaves only her wedding ring hand still functioning, an emblem of how her marriage sustains her. When she loses her speech George shifts from exercising her stiff leg to exercising her voice, prodding her to sing when she cannot talk. There is a dramatic decline from her flowing Schubert to her faltering nursery song. After her first hospitalization she makes George promise not to hospitalize her again. His early return from a friend’s (bathetic) funeral interrupts her apparent suicide attempt; he finds her out of the chair, fallen beneath the window. She then tries to die by refusing to accept food and water.
At that point we become aware of George’s implicit disintegration. We have watched him serving her lovingly -- and without resentment -- as he shares her indignities of aging. He carries her, feeds her, raises her panties before their slow shuffle out of the bathroom, changes her soaked bedclothes, learns to diaper her. As he tells Eva, things will continue as they are, worsening, until it stops. Until he stops it.
He snaps when Anne spits the water back at him. By reflex he slaps her, is appalled, and apologizes. Here Haneke cuts in a montage of a tapestry and paintings, closeups of the art on their walls. As the full-screen images omit the frames, the images are of life not art. They are all landscapes, predominantly dark, bleak, with cloudy skies. If the sequence provides a contemplative relief from the shock of his slap, the images also express Georges’ apprehension of life’s bleakness and mortality. In them coalesce the emotions and helplessness that now turn Georges to fulfill Anne’s unspoken but demonstrated wish to be euthanized.
Georges tells Anne two stories. The first is his boyhood memory of being moved to tears by an old French film about lovers who have the courage to renounce each other because of their disparity in class. That contrasts to Georges‘ more heroic sacrifice in serving his love to the end -- and then some. Georges remembers being as emotional in retelling the story as he was watching the film. In the second story -- which seems to trigger his smothering of Anne -- he recalls his suffering at a summer camp, from which his mother couldn’t free him before he came down with diphtheria. Then he frees Anne from her torture, despite her reflexive struggle to stay alive. When he smothers her Georges is at once his most monstrous and his most generous and loving. At least, that’s my reading.
In two scenes Georges confronts a pigeon in their flat. Unlike the prominent drawing of a bird on a shelf, this pigeon represents an invasive, discomfiting nature. In the first incident Georges closes the doors but opens the window so he can flush the bird out. In the second -- after he has killed Anne -- he closes that window as well as the doors, then traps the bird in a blanket. The last we see is him caressing the trapped bird. We then see him writing that he released it. We don’t see if he admits he euthanized Anne.
We don’t see him release the bird. We don’t see him kill it. In a Haneke film nothing important is neatly tied up. As the opening concert audience was in effect watching us watch them, the pigeon’s fate may be reading us by how we read it.
Here’s my projection. Why would he close the window if he intended to release the bird? If he does smother the bird after caressing it, he would only be repeating how he killed Anne. Why kill the bird? Well, why should this paltry creature persist alive when his beloved Anne is gone? And however certain he may be that his euthanasia served Anne’s most profound desire and need, he may well still harbour some sense of guilt. The lover has killed. Killing the bird -- the way he killed Anne -- may be his redefinition of himself, an expression of -- however palliated -- guilt. Claiming he released the bird may show he is in denial. After all, we’re talking about layers of awareness here, not the simple motivations and certainties of romantic fiction. In the next scene he denies Anne is dead when he imagines hearing then seeing her doing the dishes and then taking him out for a walk, reminding him to don his overcoat. This hallucination was set up in his earlier vision of her playing the piano, when he was playing the CD. In the affection, the smothering, the denial, the pigeon scene replays his last help to Anne.
Haneke doesn’t tell us what finally happens to Georges but he has set up clues. In his fantasy or madness Georges goes with Anne for one last walk. In effect he reunites with her, presumably by drowning, as his nightmare of finding himself ankle deep in water and being smothered portended. It’s Paris so he dies in Seine. That’s amour, as in real not cinema love. Georges serves Anne selflessly as long as he can, then he helps her out. Unable to carry on without her he has the faith to rejoin her.
The film is framed by intrusions into the lovers’ flat. Before the couple’s story begins the firemen and police break into their sanctuary. After the couple’s story ends the physical damage has been repaired and daughter Eva takes over. At last she has her real estate investment. She sits in her father’s chair, boxed by the doorways as if in her own casket. She is poignantly alone, still not fathoming the love the apartment has lost. Earlier she recalled as a child hearing her parents making love and feeling secure that they would always be together. What we have been watching -- and which she could never understand -- is her parents’ more profound love-making as they deal with the vicissitudes of time and loss. They had the real love; she’s left with the unreal estate. This film is about that particular amour, not the romanticized generality.
Perhaps the chilly, frustrated Eva casts a different light on our loving couple. Her scenes with her parents show remarkably little comfort, love, connection. Anne dreads her and Geoff’s visit and is later pained by Eva’s blathering presence. Nor is there any engagement -- or even a snapshot -- of their grandchildren. Perhaps the couple’s intense love came at the cost of their isolation. They were so close they effectively excluded their daughter. They have a warmer relationship with student Alexandre than with daughter Eva. She has inherited her parents’ music but not their love. Now when she feels the duty to be close she doesn’t know how.
Closing on Huppert raises another question. How does this film relate to Haneke's The PianoTeacher (2001)? There Huppert played a sado-masochistic piano teacher still living at home with her domineering mother. That’s for another day.
