Taking place almost entirely in an elderly couple’s Paris apartment, Michael Haneke’s steely, poignant Amour is a chamber drama on the subject of love at the end of life. In Funny Games, Cach and The White Ribbon, the renowned Austrian filmmaker acquired a rep as a Mensa sadist, torturing his characters and audiences with acts of physical and psychological brutality. Here, though, he regards his protagonists with admiration and affection. As Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) suffers two strokes and loses her mobility and speech, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) attends to her needs with the obsessiveness of a teen boy who thinks no one can come between him and his first love; he rejects offers of help even from daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert), telling her, “Your concern is of no use to me.”
Amour takes its heart and pulse from two venerable icons of French cinema: Trintignant, first noted as Brigitte Bardot’s boy toy in 1956’s … And God Created Woman, and Riva, who was indelible in 1959’s Hiroshima Mon Amour. Now 81 and 85, respectively, they bring an austere ferocity to their roles, living inside two people who have been together for ages and must struggle through a kind of postmortem memorial to their ageless affection. People decline and decay, this incandescent movie suggests. But love–and Amour–never dies. (In select theaters Dec. 19)
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