AMOUR is a brutal, honest, detailed, uncompromising and cautionary evocation of what it means for one elderly spouse to care for another elderly spouse with a terminal illness.
AMOUR is documentary fiction. Fiction can be more honest and factual than “documentary,” real time footage, edited to create a film. Only in fictional, staged film can detailed accuracy be achieved. Filming real events as they happen is always fraught with irrelevancies and distractions. The final “documentary” film is created not in real life, but in the editing room. In staged fiction the essence of the issue can be assembled exactly.
AMOUR systematically recounts the challenges faced by an elderly man coping with the problems of caring for his wife, who is suffering though a series of more and more debilitating strokes.
For those already experienced with similar events, the issues and memories this movie evokes will be provocative. For future health care workers, and people who have not faced these issues, this film paints pictures of many events that will occur -- from the sudden onset of the illness, through bedridden care, through death.
The way that events are handled in the film is not necessarily the way any particular couple will deal with them, but it is a catalog of many (good and bad) possibilities.
Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva play the couple. We learn little of the characters’ backstory. They are in their 80's. She was a piano teacher. Their daughter (Isabelle Huppert) lives far away. They seem to have an active, warm and loving life (with some problems) before her first episode.
But there is another backstory at work, contributing to the poignancy: the actors’ backstory. We remember them as movie stars in many films (especially, perhaps, Emmanuelle as the woman in Hiroshima Mon Amour; and Jean-Louis in A Man and a Woman). Once, they were romantic movie stars dashing through the world; in this film, now, they are shuffling across the floor.
The visual design is clear and precise, and almost always just a little bit dark; their apartment is old, clean, spacious, and simply furnished.
AMOUR, directed by Michael Haneke is a deeply emotional film, brilliantly acted. The 2012 winner of the Palme D’Or (grand prize) at the Cannes Film Festival, it opens December 19th 2012 in the US.