5/5 stars

Michael Haneke does not want you to enjoy his films.  In fact, he would prefer it if there were moments in his work that disturbed you so greatly they forced you to shut your eyes and wait for their passing.  His latest film, Amour, may be about love, but it is a love we are unenthusiastic to consider.  When you will be old, grey, attending the theatre, and there are no more lapses into youthful vigor, what will you have?  For the elderly man in the film’s couple, it is his memories.  For the woman, her dignity and the entrusting of her care to her husband as she descends further into neurological disrepair and physical decay.

The film cares little about how to order the events to show the viewer, choosing to open with a corpse.  Time means something different to the senescent.  In typical Hanekian fashion, violence erupts from the screen before you have time to register its cause.  It demonstrates the potential in all of from which violence might come; a part of our mind that is often hidden but awaken to enact an ambiguous purpose.  When the romance falls away from those of us who live to see a long lasting partnership into our waning years, there will be days defined solely by survival.  Haneke lingers on this morbid listlessness.

The most haunting quality of his depiction is its ever-living nature.  We may not like to admit it, but the old are subject to the same nightmares, tedium, and moments desperate for relief as we are.  Our culture may present them as bastions of wisdom, but the couple inhabiting Amour are fragile, going into death frightened as they hold onto one another.  You won’t want to see it, but you must.  This is what awaits us beyond the bend, the journey we must travel. This is love.

Lenhardt Stevens