Movie recommendation: Amour

Yesterday I saw the new (2012) French-language movie “Amour,” and urge you to see it.  But be warned that it’s a gritty and realistic portrayal of the end of life. That is the hard part to take, especially because the life is that of a lively woman (Anne Laurent, played by Emmanuelle Riva)—half of a loving French couple who have been together, teaching and enjoying music, for many years. One day Anne has a stroke, and everything changes. Her husband, the equally skilled actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, runs a gamut of emotions as Anne slowly declines: we see his love and solicitude for his wife, his frustration at their inability to communicate, his sadness for what is being lost, and, ultimately, his anger that he must care for a person whom he no longer knows.  There is mystery at the end, and I won’t divulge what happens, but if you love terrific acting, and can tolerate an unsparing portrait of death at old age, this is the movie for you.  Isabelle Huppert, wonderful as always, plays the daughter.

My nephew, whose master’s thesis in film was on how old people are portrayed in movie, says that this may be the best movie of 2012. It’s certainly the best I’ve seen, with Lincoln in second place.  Because people don’t like to face the prospect of getting old, they don’t like seeing physical decline on the screen, and I’ve seen only three movies about aging that I thought were great (this one, Tokyo Story, and Make Way for Tomorrow). I watched this film at the local student moviehouse (Doc Films); and Sunday matinees, particularly those with “serious” films, often attract older viewers. At least three of them walked out during this movie, perhaps because it reminded them (as it did me) of our mortality.

Amour, I found out later, cleaned up the film awards. As Wikipedia notes:

The film was screened at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or. It won the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards, and was nominated in four other categories: Best Picture, Best Actress in a Leading Role (Emmanuelle Riva), Best Original Screenplay (Michael Haneke) and Best Director (Michael Haneke). At the age of 85, Emmanuelle Riva is the oldest nominee for the Best Actress in a Leading Role.

At the 25th European Film Awards, it was nominated in six categories, winning in four, including Best Film and Best Director. At the 47th National Society of Film Critics Awards it won the awards for Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress.At the 66th British Academy Film Awards it was nominated in four categories, winning for Best Leading Actress and Best Film Not in the English Language. Emmanuelle Riva became the oldest person to win a BAFTA.At the 38th César Awards it was nominated in ten categories, winning in five, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress.

Riva’s performance is brilliant. The movie got a 93% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and, of course, four stars from the now-late Roger Ebert. As a memorial to Ebert, who was facing his own end-of-life issues when he saw this film, I quote a bit of his review of Amour:

Old age isn’t for sissies, and neither is this film. Trintignant and Riva courageously take on these roles, which strip aside all the glamor of their long careers (he starred in “A Man and a Woman,” she most famously in “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”). Their beauty has faded, but it glows from within. It accepts unflinchingly the realities of age, failure and the disintegration of the ego.

Yes, and to watch “Amour” invites us — another audience — to accept them, too. When I saw “Hiroshima, Mon Amor” (1959), I was young and eager and excited to be attending one of the first French art films I’d ever seen. It helped teach me what it was, and who I was. Now I see that the film, its actors and its meaning have all been carried on, and that the firemen are going to come looking for all of us one of these days, sooner or later. [JAC: the fireman find Anne’s body].

This is now. We are filled with optimism and expectation. Why would we want to see such a film, however brilliantly it has been made? I think it’s because a film like “Amour” has a lesson for us that only the cinema can teach: the cinema, with its heedless ability to leap across time and transcend lives and dramatize what it means to be a member of humankind’s eternal audience.

I give this movie two thumbs up, and recommend it highly.