The Cruelty of Time: Amour

In Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012), death is smelt before it is seen. The film opens with a shocking discovery: emergency services breach a sealed Parisian apartment following complaints of an odour emanating from within to find, behind taped-shut bedroom doors, the corpse of an elderly woman, the pillow beneath her head covered tenderly in cut flowers. This encounter with the scent and subsequent physical evidence of death doubles as both an end and a beginning from which everything subsequently emanates. The film’s remainder – which chronicles the diminishing faculties of retired piano teacher Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and the effect of this on her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) – is thereby injected with inevitability, the focus shifted from outcome to process. Indeed, all that follows is an amelioration for Michele Aaron’s observation that, compared to the swiftly dispatched corpses littering Hollywood cinema, “the pain or smell of death, the banality of physical, or undignified, decline, the dull ache of mourning, are rarely seen” onscreen.¹

Unlike the eruptive, interpersonal forms of violence dominating Haneke’s earlier Funny Games (1997), La pianiste (The Piano Teacher, 2001) and Caché (Hidden, 2005), the violence at the centre of Amour is durational and interior, originating from death’s gradual transformation of the body. Haneke’s rigorous and often austere aesthetic style – here manifest through a combination of static long takes, measured pacing, naturalistic lighting and lack of score – facilitates a direct, unflinchingly sustained encounter with Anne’s slow loss of physical autonomy and verbal communication, witnessed both by Georges and us, the audience. Since the earliest days of cinema, the subject of death has served principally as a locus of instantaneous spectacle,² deeply enmeshed in the medium’s thrilling ability to capture a sudden cessation of movement. Yet Amour lingers in the cracks opened up by Anne’s growing incapacitation, in the gradual passage towards non-movement initiated by the physiological process of death. After Georges discovers Anne in eerie, stroke-induced stupor at the kitchen table one morning, her vacant eyes unresponsive to his confused questions, we watch as these cracks deepen irrevocably; their life as it once was beginning to fade.

As Anne’s condition worsens, the film becomes increasingly punctuated with scenes of Georges and visiting nurses aiding her with leg exercises, hair washing, toilet visits, eating, and changing diapers. Filmed mostly in unsentimental – though not uncompassionate – static long takes, these scenes allow the mundanity and physical labour of care to surface, and restore to representation some of the bodily realities and finer details of illness rarely seen on film. What we see of Anne and Georges’ love is seldom verbalised and also occupies the realm of quotidian gestures: their bodies pressed together in the living room as he helps her move in short, staggered increments from her wheelchair into an armchair could, in an earlier time, have signified the beginnings of an amorous encounter (during a visit, their daughter Eva [Isabelle Huppert] recalls feeling reassured by listening to them making love when she was a child, the sound furnishing her naïve fantasy that “we’d always be together”). In another scene, Anne’s aged, naked body is vulnerably on display in a head-on, static shot as a nurse dispassionately scrubs and then washes her skin, the too-warm temperature of the water evident in Anne’s wordless sounds of discomfort. We are not spared even from these most blisteringly intimate of moments, which throw into confronting relief the often-circular nature of bodily experience: being born into a state of helplessness to which, if we live long enough, we will eventually return. 

Compared with a mainstream cinema that so often spares us the unglamorous details comprising the process of dying, such startlingly unmediated, detailed and matter-of-fact representation can feel overwhelming and even intrusive. This is especially true in the comfortable, bourgeois life which Georges and Anne inhabit, a world which Haneke has frequently reproached for its serial “sweeping under the carpet of uncomfortable elements.”³ In Amour, the chaotic energy which lurks beneath societal niceties, always threatening to erupt, is the unassimilable void of death. The inconvenient fact of bodily deterioration ruptures the polite rituals of everyday life: when a former pupil of Anne’s, the successful concert pianist Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud), makes an unplanned visit, he unexpectedly finds his mentor confined to a wheelchair, the right side of her body paralysed. In a society that exalts physical mobility and independence, Anne experiences the effects of her illness as a loss of dignity; uncomfortable with the sympathy of others, she politely asks Alexandre to change the subject. As Asbjørn Grønstad writes, Amour “draw[s] attention to the inadequacies of the world of culture when confronted with the cruelties of our corporeal existence,” where even those who live the most materially comfortable lives – enough to hire visiting nurses three times a week – are not exempt from sickness and death.⁴

Though we only meet Georges and Anne in their 80s, Amour offers glimpses of richly cultured lives animated by objects, stories, images, and people. The couple’s spacious apartment (constructed meticulously on a soundstage and modelled after Haneke’s parents’ home in Vienna), where almost the entire film takes place, contains shelves filled to the brim with books and CDs and decorated with vases, busts and red babushka dolls. An old photo album harbours a serrated-edged postcard from Gimel-les-Cascades alongside black-and-white photographs of Anne as a girl with dark, bobbed hair sitting on a brick wall, and a younger Georges glancing at the photographer from a white hammock (a young Riva and Trintignant, respectively). “It’s beautiful,” Anne declares as her fingers leaf through the rustling glassine interleaves, “Life. So long. Long life.” Yet this contented sentiment belies ambiguity and uncertainty. The proportions of harmony and strain comprising their relationship remain unclear: in a tender moment Georges affectionately comments on her beauty, but how much is contained in Anne’s later unsettling description of him as “a monster, but nice”? Is the new instability wrought by her illness responsible for the ascension of an idealised perception of their life together, the album a vessel of the desire for a sublime past to look back on? The refuge of fantasy certainly takes hold of Georges; his grasp on the present frays as he begins to imagine Anne as she was before, playing the piano in the living room and washing dishes in the kitchen.

We often think of love in a similarly idealised manner, in terms of its healing properties – and as that which can empower us to make peace with change and even accept the fact of death. Yet for Georges, powerlessly witnessing the physical and mental collapse of his life companion awakens a storm of unreconcilable emotions. This entanglement forms the crux of the film: Haneke conceived of the project in response to his own experiences witnessing the suffering of an elderly relative, which spawned a desire “to investigate this feeling of being able to do nothing about it.”⁵ Early into Amour, the dilemma arises: do you respect a dying loved one’s wishes, even at great cost to yourself and others? Georges’ love for Anne compels him to reluctantly submit to her refusal to return to hospital, contributing to their increased isolation from the outside world, yet it also prevents him from considering, for any length of time, her expressed desire to not continue living. When she defiantly spits out the water he has forced into her mouth, he strikes the side of her face in frustration. And then, finally, there is his unnervingly spontaneous smothering of Anne to death – whose words have now distilled into repeated wailings of “mal” (“hurts”) – which he does after sharing a recollection from his childhood while gently stroking her hand. Is this enigmatic act one of sympathy to end Anne’s suffering, or a desperate bid to liberate himself from his own unbearable proximity to it? Haneke offers no easy answers; in Amour love offers no clarity, it only complicates. The lone certainty that emerges is the body’s vulnerability to the ruthless inexorability of time, and the powerlessness we must endure in its presence. If nothing else does, time is what pulls us apart in the end.

Amour (2012 France/Austria/Germany 128 mins)

Prod Co: Les Films du Losange, X Filme Creative Pool, Wega Film, France 3 Cinéma, Canal+ Prod: Margaret Ménégoz, Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka, Michael Katz Dir, Scr: Michael Haneke Phot: Darius Khondji Ed: Monika Willi, Nadine Muse Prod Des: Jean-Vincent Puzos Art Dir: Thierry Poulet Cos Des: Catherine Leterrier

Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert, Alexandre Tharaud, William Shimell, Ramón Agirre, Rita Blanco, Carole Franck, Dinara Drukarova

Endnotes