Amour

Some people watch movies to escape from real life. Some watch in order to live vicariously. Some people want movies to confirm their ideas about love, good triumphing over evil, and all the rest of the clichés we're subjected to when we're children.And some people watch movies because they appreciate, even though it is a rare thing, a tale told truthfully without varnish, deception, or avoidance.Amour falls squarely into the latter category of marvels. Other reviewers have summarized the plot. It is enough to say that this is a deeply engrossing movie precisely because it deals with something we all must face eventually: our final moments. People always hope they will die "a good death" - the Hollywood fantasy of a painless exit surrounded by one's family and friends, with suitable theme music playing in the background and a magical fairyland waiting in the sky as the credits roll. In reality most people die in hospital beds, alone and afraid and confused, with tubes sticking into them and bedsores festering and indifferent exhausted nurses passing heedless as a desperate effort is made to inhale one very last breath...Amour unflinchingly observes the complexities of the end of life. There's no Hollywood pap about "triumphing over adversity" or making light of infirmity by turning it into a character tic. This is a deeply moving, painful, and utterly true account of one particular couple's way of dealing with the awful inexorable truth of the descent into nothingness and how horrible it is.You won't be uplifted by this movie. The makers of this film weren't anxious about focus group feedback, ensuring sufficient feel-good moments, and a "cathartic but uplifting" end. Instead they made a real, honest, and true account of the end of life. It's absolutely marvelous. The acting is superb, the direction restrained and poised, and everything is under-stated. If you enjoyed movies like House of Sand and Fog or Das Leben der Anderen, you'll appreciate this wonderful offering. But if your idea of a good movie is anything with Tom Hanks in it, you should probably look elsewhere.

Love Can't Always Keep Us Together, as the old song goes. Troubles interfere, time passes and things change. Love can endure, and we see it up close and personal in this film.This film has two main characters, Georges and Anne, retired music teachers in their 80s played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva. They live in Paris in a beautiful apartment where the grand piano is Up front and center. They seem very happy and they are still in love. The opening scene is a concert given by a former pupil, that Georges and Anne attend. That is the last happy scene. Anne suffers a stroke after carotid surgery, the 5% side effect. She is still able to speak and think, and Anne makes Georges promise never to put her in a hospital again. and, so the slow dance of time begins.This is at times a lovely film, full of love, but, then, it is sad and the angst George's and Anne feels, we feel. It is difficult to watch a loved one deteriorate and slowly die. Most of us go through it, with one or another of relatives. Even though it is difficult to watch this film, it brings us closer to our own thoughts. How we all think about our lives, ourselves. How will we die, how will our loved ones die? There is no answer.Moving film of life and death and dying. Should be seen by all.Recommended. prisrob 09-03-13

Winner of the Golden Palm at Cannes, "Amour" is a magnificent masterpiece by arguably the greatest film artist alive in the world today, Michael Haneke. Uncompromising and devastating in its emotional power, "Amour" tells of an elderly woman who falls victim to a stroke and her husband must deal with her illness as their lives move towards their inevitable end.Haneke displays a full understanding of and compassion for our human condition without resorting to any soap operatic banalities. He directs with his iconic cold austerity, appropriately keeping the camera at arm's length until the fatal if subtle exact moment of the stroke at the breakfast table when his style changes to an appropriate intimacy. In Haneke, no element or shot is extraneous: like the attempted break-in at the beginning (a bringer of fear that perhaps brings on the event as well as being a harbinger of fate) and the pigeon who twice intrudes into their apartment, Haneke is certainly aware of its religious significance. This -- and his last masterpiece, "The White Ribbon" -- are two films that lay claim to him being the Austrian Bergman, and this is his "Winter Light". It is harsh and cruel, but it is also compassionate. It is also one of the great stories of love. (One interesting point is that Haneke deliberately designed the apartment of the octogenarians to mirror the apartment of his own parents.)The film strikes me as formally perfect, as perfect as Michelangelo's Pieta, Mahler's Ninth or Bergman's "Cries and Whispers". A diamond without one false shot, one strained movement, one element of sentimentality, bathos or fraudulent emotion. Seeing it was for me a journey of discovery: painful, even unlikable, and revelatory. And having seen it, my life has been altered, I am a different person, and it will stay with me as long as my memory remains.My highest recommendation to intelligent viewers.

Pues la película me hizo llorar pero Amazon no tiene la culpa de eso :,c

Amour (2012) is Austrian director Michael Haneke's 11th feature film and one would be hard-pressed to think of another filmmaker whose output has been so consistently accomplished, so sharply challenging, so intellectually rigorous and so profound over such a long period of time. The man has not made a bad film! The consistency has been so staggeringly high that it's impossible to pick out one above the other. Even his remakes (2007's Funny Games US) are on the same extraordinary high level. With each film Haneke explores a different social area with breathtaking incision. At the risk of being simplistic, whether the subject be bourgeois inertia (The Seventh Continent), the media (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance), family (Benny's Video), violence (Funny Games), racial/social integration (Code Unknown), pornography/sexual repression (The Piano Teacher), the Apocalypse (Time of the Wolf), personal relationships (Hidden) or the origins of fascism (The White Ribbon), Haneke always applies the scalpel to revelatory effect. His approach is severe, cold, cerebral, anti-commercial, arrogant. Some people hate this man's films for being so damned uncomfortable to watch and it is fair comment that the almost complete lack of humor can sometimes be a problem. The only other director comparable to him would be that other master of humorlessness, Robert Bresson. But where the great French director had terrible trouble finding funds to make his masterpieces having to wait for the French New Wave to 'discover' him, Haneke has no trouble attaining funds and kudos in equal measure. Every film he makes invariably gets showered with awards, his last two features picking up the Cannes Palme d'Or. Amour even picked up an Oscar for best foreign film (and was nominated in the main category as well). Where Bresson had to struggle, Haneke has only to choose his subject, do his thing and the acclaim comes pouring in. For a director who is so uncompromisingly and aggressively anti-commercial this is surely unique in the world today.I have waited a long time to see a film tackle the thorny subject of old age, illness and death with complete honesty. With Amour finally we have something which can be put alongside Tokyo Story (1953, Ozu Yasujiro­), and not be found wanting. An extraordinary achievement, it tells a story sadly familiar to many of us. Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are an octogenarian married couple. Retired music teachers, they share an apartment in Paris and enjoy a loving relationship. One morning Anne goes blank at the breakfast table. She has suffered a stroke. Medical tests confirm she needs an operation. The operation goes wrong and her right side is paralyzed. Anne makes Georges promise never to take her back to the hospital. It is clear that she will never recover and the film charts her painful decline (in unflinching detail) as Georges endeavors valiantly to care for her in the apartment until the very end.Stated so baldly, one might ask, 'why on earth would anyone want to watch this?' and indeed Trintignant freely admits in an interview on this DVD that he for one would rather pass. For Haneke though, clearly death and the way humans react to it is just as much a part of life as any of the other social issues he has tackled before and is therefore more than worthy subject matter. An important difference with this film though, is that the material is unusually personal for the director. An artist of integrity, he clearly feels that he couldn't dare essay such a subject without having experienced the emotions he deals with himself at first hand. As Philippe Rouyer (author of the book Haneke by Haneke) explains in an introduction on this DVD, the film is partly based on Haneke's boyhood experience of being raised by his aunt. He had saved her from committing suicide once, but was unable to do so a second time. The apartment that we see in the film is a studio set (the glimpses of Paris we see through the windows are green-screened computer graphics) and the lay out is exactly the same as his parents' apartment. The script (which was carefully crafted by Haneke himself with absolutely no leeway for improvisation from the actors) features autobiography - the stories Georges relates to Anne to alleviate her suffering are stories from the director's own childhood. Also, the promise Georges makes to Anne to never let her die in a hospital or home is identical to the mutual promise Haneke and his wife have made in real life. In short, Michael Haneke has been there and seen it all. The emotions transmitted in the film are extraordinarily honest as a consequence.For a film of such personal significance it was important for Haneke to deploy actors who were absolutely right for their roles. Trintignant's voice and his eyes were the attraction here and they are used astoundingly by both actor and director alike throughout. There is not a trace of artifice as we sense that Haneke absolutely wrote the film for him in much the same way as Hidden was written for Daniel Auteuil. Riva is also astonishing, cast partly because of the director's attachment to Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959, Alain Resnais), but also again because of those eyes and that screen presence. She also happened to live in Paris which helped. Casting is perfect down to the smallest roles. Isabelle Huppert does well with her few scenes as Eva, the daughter who tries to help, but is really powerless to intervene. In one sense the film is about music. Haneke did think about titling it The Music Stops. Huppert was of course the piano teacher in the 2001 film of the same name while other roles go to real life musicians - opera singer William Shimell as Eva's English husband Geoff and pianist Alexandre Tharaud playing himself.So what does Haneke give us here apart from lingering death? Well, the answer lies in the title. It is incontrovertibly a love story, quite possibly the most moving ever put on film, and the question that keeps being asked throughout is how do you cope when the person you love (the person you can't possibly ever imagine being separated from) slowly dies in front of you? The answer for Georges (as for all lovers) is the exclusion of all others and a selfless dedication to his partner. Their daughter Eva is close. There is no doubting the mutual love between her and her parents, but when it comes down to dealing with mortality, the matter is entirely between her parents and ultimately nothing to do with her. This exclusion is something rarely if ever acknowledged on film and it's to Haneke's great credit that he features it so strongly.The love story is subtly rendered from the start of the film onwards. The film opens with the door of the apartment being forced and the police entering to find Anne's dead body embroidered with flowers lying on the bed. The next scene takes us back a few months and out of the apartment for the first and only time in the film as we go the theater. The camera stares at the audience from the point of view of the stage and (as in the famous final shot of Hidden) it is only slowly, gradually that we can pick out Georges and Anne sitting in the middle of the audience. The piano recital begins and it is a Schubert impromptu, the opening notes of which announcing the profound desolation that is about to engulf the couple in the narrative. For the first and last time in the film the music continues across shots as we see the old couple greet the pianist (her old student) after the concert and then sit on a bus taking them home. The way they relate to each other, the way their bodies act and react we know this is a couple deeply in love. As the film develops, Anne's decline is mirrored by the increasing severity with which all intruders are excluded from their lives - the concerned neighbors, the nurses, Eva and her husband, the pianist Alexandre Tharaud. Georges' absolute devotion is shown when he ejects an insensitive care worker and then refuses to let Eva in to see her mother. Eva is upset at her exclusion, but when Anne comes to she makes it clear she doesn't want her daughter in the room. Aggressive guarding of privacy and an absolute bond with each other are what drives the couple. It is Georges' intention to provide for his wife exactly as she requests and he delivers on his promises in no uncertain terms. Everything he does, he does for love and the emotional wringer through which he is pulled works inexorably on his body and soul.It is to Trintignant and Riva's enormous credit that all of this comes across so powerfully, but of course the extraordinary mise-en-scene that their director provides is truly out of this world. Haneke has stated that he loves working in studios because he has absolute control over the way everything looks and feels. With cameraman Darius Khondji he deploys extended shots with an extremely mobile camera which follows actors (especially Trintignant) around, drawing us closely into the narrative. Apparently, in the 127 minute film there are only 236 cuts with a shot length of the average of 32 seconds - long by normal standards. The framing is very exact and the dedication to capturing exactly the nuances of eye movement, of body contact, the tone of voice is obviously deeply exacting. One doesn't want to take one's eyes off the screen for fear of missing something during this quietly understated display of cinematic pyrotechnics.The film's ending has raised a good deal of debate and here is perhaps not the place to deal with it. Regarding the pigeon I was reminded of the French avant garde composer Olivier Messiaen and why he used birdsong in so much of his music. His answer was that his music is deeply devotional and that birds are the closest thing he knew to angels and to God. Notice Georges' reaction to seeing the bird in the apartment. He closes (not opens) the window and once trapped beneath his jacket, he sinks to the floor fondling the creature. We can be reasonably sure here that we are dealing with his imagination and his cherishing of his wife's soul. That said, Haneke is a director who likes to pose questions more than answer them and (as in all his films) there is an element of open-endedness to proceedings. Perhaps the ending is what we choose it to be. Whatever we decide, the apartment is left bare and the daughter is left alone - excluded beyond the last.I can't recommend this film highly enough. Artificial Eye's presentation is superb. The visuals (aspect ratio 16:9, 1.85:1) are top drawer and the sound (5.1/2.0 Dolby Digital) extremely clear. The extras are also generous - the Philippe Rouyer introduction, the Trintignant interview and a substantial 'making of' documentary. For once we don't get the usual Haneke interview that accompanies most of these AE releases. As said, this film is deeply personal for him and perhaps he prefers others to do the talking. I have no hesitation in pronouncing this as one of the 2 or 3 great films made so far this millennium. In decades to come this film will be talked about in terms of awe. Even if the subject doesn't grab you, you'd be a fool to miss such staggering film-making.

Je viens de perdre ma femme de la maladie d'ALZHEIMER. Je n'ai pas su regarder ce film jusqu'au bout.Je culpabilise sur mon comportement.

Conmovedora película de este perspicaz director bávaro, muy propenso a diseccionar, hábilmente, el comportamiento y los sentimientos humanos, no sin cierta frialdad aparente, provocando en el espectador un asombro contemplativo o, en su defecto, un rechazo manifiesto.Con gran economía de medios -podría llevarse al teatro con no más de cinco o seis actores, de los cuales, tres serían los imprescindibles-, narra una historia sobrecogedora, trágicamente veraz, devastadora, que tiene su base, al parecer, en hechos reales acaecidos en el entorno familiar del propio director.Un acierto la elección de los dos experimentados actores principales (Jean-Louis Trintignant y Emmanuelle Riva): bordan sus papeles.La versión original, en francés, permite apreciar la auténtica dicción de los protagonistas; si bien, los doblajes al castellano y catalán no están mal. Viene subtitulada, también, en estas dos últimas lenguas.Tal vez no sea un filme recomendable para todos, aunque sí se trata de buen cine.Por un poco más (precio realmente bajo), es preferible escoger la versión Blu-ray Disc en lugar del DVD ( no obstante, ambos formatos se ven y se oyen maravillosamente).De entre los extras, destacar el extracto en el que Jean-Louis Trintignant recita un poema que explora, en primera persona, las razones de la existencia.

Es una película muy "Michael Haneke", a pesar de que el tema se prestaba al sentimentalismo y la compasión, Haneke hace una película sin ninguna emoción, basada en el diálogo (escaso) y las miradas de los protagonistas, el final "Haneke" puro. Sensacional