TIFF 2012 Review: AMOUR Serves Up Death and Empathy

After a wonderful evening of watching one of her former piano students perform on the stage of the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Anne and her husband Georges settle back into their usual routine of cooking and eating breakfast early the next day.  This is sharply (and strangely) interrupted by Anne having a minor stroke.  With an unpleasant and largely futile hospital experience behind them, Anne asks Georges to promise she never goes back.  George being rather heroic in his devotion to his wife, even as she lashed out at him for her own crippled state, agrees, but then (as do we) has to bear witness to the long slow decent into complete mental and physical decrepitude.  Anne remains full of spunk, even as she is subjected to a daily routine the shortening and combing of her tangled hair, adult diapers and creams rubbed into her back to prevent bedsores.  Nurses of varying skill and care help Georges embrace what is very much a full time job.  The strain of watching his wife decline back to infantile state (in a very much adult body) is painful, especial as Haneke reminds us of all the love and promise of their relationship. 

Things are not helped by his fifty-something daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert), who has her own state of pressures, anxieties and emotional baggage.  An early conversation between George and Eva plays more like a man visiting his shrink than a father-daughter heart-to-heart.  After the stroke, they quarrel fiercely about medical and well being of Anne; her emotional and confused, him icy and logical.  Anne, usually in the other room not wanting her state to be witnessed by anyone outside of Georges, least of all Eva or her former student Andre (she cannot even listen to a Schubert concerto anymore, although the director lets it play on the soundtrack often for us.)  Anne is seen constantly gripping some sort of stress ball with her claw-like hand; her dying is painful and stressful in every way, as eventually she can only lie there in pain and wait for it to happen.  The few happy moments in the film, whether from old photographs, afternoon daydreams, or a temporary increase in Anne's mobility via technology, only serve as small peaks of joy to provide a vantage point to see just how far the slide into the abyss is below.

One wonders if this will become a genre of films as the Boomer generation marches forward into the collective health-care system.  And really, if it becomes some sort of grim subgenre, then Haneke has already made the definitive entry into it.  When you hear Roy Batty ask his creator for, "More Life, Fucker" you may wonder if the angel-like Batty wants to enter a frail dotage, or in the words of the Kurgan, "It's better to burn out than to fade away!"  The pop culture industry has always been in the business of romanticizing death of the young, from Bonnie & Clyde to Jimmi Hendrix to Marilyn Monroe. 

Leave it to Haneke, as close to a successor to Kubrick as we have these days (OK, P.T. Anderson aside), to essay the reverse in such a compelling and powerful fashion.  At one point in the film, George chases a pigeon out of his apartment, the bird having snuck through an open window when nobody was looking.  This symbol has often represented an impending death in the household.  Later, the pidgeon sneaks back in, and George has a length chase trying to capture it with a blanket.  The scene is lengthy, and maybe even a bit excessive, but it nevertheless is an absurd and precise reminder that we're all going to die, even if we go on the merry chase to keep our house free of birdshit.