The Art of Film

‘C’est beau.’

‘Quoi?’

‘La vie!’

Amour (2012), directed by Michael Haneke and starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva.

Georges and Anne are retired music teachers, living in a Parisian apartment. They lead pleasant, harmonic lives until Anne has a stroke. As a consequence, she has an operation that goes wrong, and ends up, partially paralysed, in a wheelchair. Georges tries to take care of her as best he can, but as Anne’s condition worsens, the strain it puts on him and their marriage becomes all the more poignant. 

You’ve probably been yelled at from all angles to GO SEE THIS FILM (if you haven’t, consider this me yelling at you), and with good reason, though not for the usual reasons. Amour resembles some other modern films I have seen (for example We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011) and Archipelago (Joanna Hogg, 2010)) in that it is a quiet, slow-paced film, reflecting the nature of Georges and Anne’s life together. The only music in Amour is the odd piece of diegetic piano music. The film consists largely of scenes shot with a stationary camera, and cuts are rare. 

I think it’s completely and utterly personal whether you are able to enjoy or stand this. Speaking for myself, I quite like it, simply because that is what life is - a series of eating, sleeping, showering and toileting sequences, with some extracurricular activities and visitors in between.

What makes Amour so very different from so many other films, is that it is not a pleasant film. It really isn’t. It’s raw, it’s depressing, it’s uncomfortable, and it gives one a hollow feeling in the stomach. And that is where its strength lies. Michael Haneke does not beautify Anne’s deterioration; he shows it as (I’m guessing) it is in real life. The degrading embarrassments Anne has to undergo (wetting her bed, being coarsely showered by a nurse) are so cringing because of Emmanuelle Riva’s incredible and subtle acting.

But Amour’s unpleasantness is not without purpose. The question that continually arises throughout the movie, is why Georges doesn’t lift the burden off himself and Anne. His daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) wants to send her to a care home. Anne herself alludes to euthanasia shortly after her stroke, saying she knows her condition will only worsen, and that she doesn’t want them both to suffer because of her. She literally says, ‘Je ne veux plus’, ‘I don’t want to anymore.’

So what is the ‘love’ the title refers to? What aspect of the story does it signify? I’ve been internally debating this for a few days now, and I still find it difficult. Maybe all of it - Georges nursing his wife, not relenting. He knows she is only getting worse and will eventually die, but continues to take care of her. I would have given up at the very beginning. But that brings me to a second conception of love that has been on my mind - that of compassion and pity. For both parties, Georges and Anne, the whole film is one long road of suffering and anguish. Wouldn’t it have been a greater sign of love if Georges had agreed with Anne at the beginning of her illness, that they would both be ‘better off’, if you pardon the economic connotation of the phrase, if Anne was euthanised? Wouldn’t it save them a lot of pain, in every sense? Doesn’t compassion and, yes, giving up require more love than holding onto the dying for as long as possible, since it is a selfless act? My own grandfather faced the same decision when his wife suffered from a very similar illness to Anne’s, and he couldn’t let her go, despite it not taking long for her to no longer be who she was. 

SPOILER ALERT DON’T READ THE FOLLOWING IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE FILM AND WOULD LIKE TO. 

SURE YOU WANT TO KNOW?

ALRIGHT, YOU CHOSE YOUR OWN FATE.

Of course, in the end, Georges does decide to end Anne’s life himself, by smothering her with a pillow, but only once she has disappeared and become unrecognisable to him and the audience, once he is sure she will not return. It’s perhaps the end of hope that makes him come to his decision. He’s reached a state of having nothing left to lose. 

END OF SPOILERS

A movie like this is, for a large part, carried by its actors, and eightysomethings Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva do an outstanding job of it. Their acting is effortless and honest. Particularly Riva is most convincing and impressive, which is why I understand she is nominated for an Oscar, while Trintignant isn’t.

Yes, Amour is an unpleasant and uncomfortable film, but that is no reason not to like it. What makes it so good, what makes it deserving of so many awards and honours, is that it tells the simple story of love, death and loss with complete honesty, and without shying away from the heartbreak and the indignity that goes with it. If you’re willing to accept that it won’t make you feel better about dying or losing the ones you love, but rather that it tells the truth about it, then you will realise that you haven’t seen a film as extraordinary as Amour in quite some time. I am in awe, and more so as time goes by.

“Really, Sam, can’t you do something about these terrorists?”

“It’s my lunch hour.”

Brazil (1985), directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Michael Palin and Kim Greist.

1984, Metropolis, Citizen Kane, Minority Report… This and more comes to mind when watching Brazil. Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is one of many working for the Ministry of Information in a massively bureaucratic and inhuman version of the 1950s-60s. He is content with his job and doesn’t want the promotion his mother has arranged for him, but he also tends to get lost in his imagination and dreams, where he is a Pegasus-like man trying to save a beautiful blonde woman (accompanied by variations on the song ‘Aquarela do Brasil’ by Ary Barroso, after which the film was named). A mistake in the system leads to the inadvertent death of an innocent man, Archibald Buttle, who was overcharged for his own arrest and torture. To correct the financial mistake (because that’s the only mistake the Ministry of Information can correct), Sam goes to the man’s widow to give her a check. There he sees the woman from his dreams, and his journey towards finding her and rescuing her begins. The road leads him through a world in which paperwork is more important than anything else, and in which it has become almost impossible to encounter something real. Sam’s mother and her friends go through cosmetic surgery sessions, making them as plastic as the food they eat. There are numerous terrorist attacks but no one seems to have seen an actual terrorist, as Jill Layton (Kim Greist), a suspected terrorist herself, puts it. This doesn’t stop government officials, such as Sam’s friend Jack Lint (Michael Palin), from performing their Information Retrieval duties (a.k.a. torture). While battling the system, Sam is helped by Archibald ‘Harry’ Tuttle (Robert De Niro), a guerrilla heating engineer and the man Archibald Buttle died for due to a clerical mistake. 

Like cast members said in the 30-minute making of, Brazil has a dream/nightmare-quality to it. There are obviously Sam’s seemingly idyllic dreams in which he is a flying superhero. And there’s the real world, where a Keep Calm And Carry On mentality dominates, thinly veiling a fake and flawed bureaucratic system. One only realises what is wrong with it when one is persecuted by it, as Sam experiences. 

One of this film’s strengths is, as is not unusual with Terry Gilliam films, the visual style. The sets are incredible, either huge halls, endless labyrinth-like office floors and circular cooling towers, or constricting, small offices and transportation systems, illustrating the omnipresent and all-powerful government versus the insignificance and commonplace quality of one man. I always enjoy futuristic movies immensely because of the visual opportunities they offer, and since some call the visual style of this film ‘retro-futuristic’, Brazil contains various reinterpretations of our environment instead of just new inventions and futuristic devices. The telephones are retro but need various plugs to be changed to answer a call, the cars are hilariously tiny (at least Sam’s is), the computers are controlled with typewriter-like keyboards and the televisions are very small and black and white. 

Despite the bleak state Sam’s world is in, this is still an amusing film. The characters are very quirky and enjoyable, especially Sam’s mother, who rejuvenates throughout the film, and Harry Tuttle. Even though De Niro’s part is small, he plays it very well and makes something of his character. Pryce plays a very natural character and throughout his journey, Sam takes the place of the audience, as he doesn’t really know what’s going on and is fighting a system he doesn’t understand. He’s naive and doesn’t fully realise what the government is capable of. For me, Pryce shows he’s capable of more than just a wig-wearing wimp in Pirates of the Caribbean, the only films of his I had previously seen. He manages to nail Sam’s persisting daydreamer quality, through everything, even through the darkest of times. 

As for the story itself, 1984-like stories are always interesting and should always be given a chance, because they explore worlds that are very often only slight exaggerations of our own. They aren’t just warnings, they are almost like choices in a labyrinth. They show us what we would end up with after we’d chosen a certain path, but because they’re films, we are able to return safely to our own world, hopefully a little wiser.

A masterpiece. Why, I can’t say exactly. Most likely, it’s a combination of everything mentioned above. But I don’t like to analyse these things to death. To put it simply, Brazil is very enjoyable to watch and one of those films where something else will stand out to you every time you see it.