Amour (12A)
Michael Haneke
Anyone purchasing the soundtrack to Michael Haneke’s Amour before seeing the film would get a comically misleading impression of the director’s use of music. It isn’t that the album’s track listing is incorrect. There is indeed Schubert and a selection of Beethoven’s Bagatelles. But every piece included in Amour is curtailed after only a few seconds by an abrupt cut, or by someone saying: “Switch it off.” (An early title for the picture was The Music Stops.) The sense of pleasure thwarted is overwhelming and appropriate for a film in which a woman’s means of communication are stemmed, her life foreshortened, after she suffers a stroke.
Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), who is in her eighties, is sitting at the kitchen table when she experiences a break in perception. One moment she and her husband, Georges (Jean- Louis Trintignant), are talking, the next she is gazing at him uncomprehendingly; it’s as though she too has been switched off. Following surgery, she is left paralysed in one side of her body. “It will go steadily downhill for a while,” Georges tells their adult daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert). “And then it will be over.”
Like Georges, Haneke is not someone to whom you’d turn if you wanted the truth broken gently. He lacks, shall we say, a certain bedside manner. The cruelty of the world he depicts is not tempered by reassurances; his is a form of tough love. The White Ribbon (village plagued by unattributable acts of violence), The Piano Teacher (woman terrorised by her mother performs degrading, self-harming acts), Benny’s Video (parents cover up a murder committed by their desensitised son) – each of these films would lose their air of appalled horror if Haneke didn’t mourn implicitly the sufferings and shortcomings on show.
Amour is different. Haneke is no less stringent now as a film-maker – a quick browse through a photograph album is the nearest Georges and Anne get to a soft-focus montage of marriage highlights. But his emphasis in Amour is on love and loyalty as positive counterpoints to mortal tortures. Even when the couple bristle at one another, or Georges loses his temper, the tension illuminates the capacious dimensions of their life together – the depth and breadth of their marriage. Partly this is the result of putting performers as profound as Riva and Trintignant in front of the camera. To whom can you look for actorly eloquence if not the woman who shouldered much of the emotional weight of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), and the man who embodied refrigerated rage in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970)? We believe in their long marriage not only because they are superb actors working from a note-perfect screenplay; there is also a lifetime’s tenacity shining through Trintignant’s husk-like face, a well of memories in Riva’s eyes. In a film frugal with music, everything still depends on this duet.
Music has always been central to Haneke, whether he has used it to terrorise (the screeching death-metal audible to us, but not to the sweetly smiling family on screen, at the start of Funny Games) or hasn’t used it at all (Hidden, his most admired film, is so unsettling partly because it includes no music whatsoever). It is in every way pivotal to Amour. Georges and Anne are retired music teachers who share an elegantly sombre Parisian apartment, shot with respectful warmth by the cinematographer Darius Khondji. The piano in their study is played only twice (once in a hallucination or memory). In its big close-up, there is noise rather than music emanating from its vicinity: the piano simply stands there while the cleaner vacuums around its legs. It is no more able to participate in the action of the scene than the paralysed Anne can object to having her hair brushed roughly by an unfeeling nurse. What a waste. The woman and the piano, that is.
Though music is rarely heard in Amour, it is often discussed. One of Anne’s former students (played by the pianist Alexandre Tharaud) visits to tell her about his recording work but neglects to bring his latest CD – another instance of music placed beyond Anne’s reach or denied outright. After Anne’s operation, Georges attends a funeral where, he later recounts, someone plays a tape-recording of the Beatles song “Yesterday”. The story rightly invites our disdain: this is not, after all, a nostalgic film. There’s no suggestion that, yesterday, all Georges and Anne’s troubles seemed so far away, only that they possessed the strength to cope with them back then (which admittedly doesn’t scan nearly as well).
The reality of nursing a partner in deteriorating health must be cushioned by the couple’s rarefied climate. Georges can produce €800 to pay a carer’s bill without noticeable pause, while Eva issues investment advice to her mother. But fortification in Amour is ultimately emotional rather than financial. The apartment, from which the film never strays after the first five minutes, becomes a symbol of that security. The picture begins with the front door being broken down but the onset of illness is more insidious.
Prior to Anne’s stroke, the couple find that the lock on their door has been tampered with inexpertly by a would-be burglar. Anne’s friend was the victim of a more successful violation: intruders gained access to the apartment building via the attic. You might say Anne is brought low in much the same way. In Amour, the home is no less pregnable than it was in Funny Games or Hidden, but now Haneke has moved out of the inhibiting genre of thriller and into a higher metaphorical register. The threat posed in Amour is not to family or morality but to life itself. Love, rather than any sophisticated security system, stands Anne and Georges in good stead against death, the ultimate housebreaker.
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