IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH (AMOUR)

 

It's the moment that many of us dread: a loved one succumbs to a terrible illness and we are cast in the role of principal carer, watching them suffer a long inexorable decline.

It is estimated as many as 6.4 million people in the UK are carers – some coping with minimal support from the state or from family members.

And as anyone in this situation will tell you, it is physically, mentally and emotionally draining but it also the ultimate expression of love and commitment to a relative. 

Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke tackles the challenges of being a carer head on in his latest movie, 'Amour' ('Love') which took the Palme d'Or earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival.

Typically for a Haneke movie, 'Amour' is an uncomfortable watch but it could very well prove to be the film of the year.

Haneke is famously anti-Hollywood in his approach to film storytelling.

Whereas most mainstream cinema goes for sweeping camera movements and fast cutting, Haneke has long been the champion of the static camera and the long take.

In doing so, he challenges his audiences to take their time and take in the full frame and therefore the full import and full horror of what they are seeing.

There is nothing manicured about his movies, no cop outs. 

Haneke wants to approximate real life in extremis – warts and all.

The filmmaker explained his philosophy in the essay, 'Films As Catharsis'.

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its disempowerment of the spectator," he defiantly wrote.

"They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent question instead of false answers; for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness; for provocation of dialogue instead of consumption of consensus.' 

And so, over the years, he has given us a chilling meditation on how cinema depicts violence in not one but two versions of his film, 'Funny Games' (one in German and one in English starring Tim Roth and Naomi Watts) about the torturing of a well to do family at their summer lakeside home.

He tackled sadomasochistic desire in 'The Piano Teacher' starring Isabelle Huppert and post-Colonial racism in 'Code Unknown' and the excellent 'Hidden' with Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil.

In his 2009 Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winning 'The White Room', he dealt with religious repression in a German village before the First World War and the ingredients which ultimately led to fascism.

In 'Amour' he poses his audience the following harrowing questions: are you doing right by your loved one by nursing them through their suffering? 

Or should you accede to their requests if they want to die?

It is a deeply unsettling set-up – especially if you've recently experienced the kind of situation Haneke depicts onscreen.

And with the help of veteran actors Jean Louis Trintignant ('Three Colours Red') and Emanuelle Riva ('Hiroshima Mon Amour'), the director pulls no punches.

Trintignant and Riva are a middle class Parisienne couple in their eighties living in an apartment.

At the beginning of the film we see Georges and Anne, a piano teacher, attending a concert by her star pupil. Haneke defiantly keeps his camera focussed on the audience and not on the pianist. 

His audience is watching a reflection of themselves – an image which hammers home how what they are about to see can happen and will happen to them.

Anne and Georges' lives are turned upside down the following morning when Anne suffers a stroke at the breakfast table.

Initially they have supportive neighbours who do the groceries for them but they also have a daughter, Eva (played by Isabelle Huppert) who lives abroad with her philandering English husband and sporadically turns up to impart advice to Georges that seems self-serving.

As Haneke's gruelling film unfolds, Anne's condition deteriorates. 

We watch with horror as she goes from struggling with the initial challenges of being in a wheelchair to being bed ridden, crying in pain and being fed pureed food and water in plastic cups.

In the aftermath of the initial stroke, Haneke raises the unsettling question of how she feels about her illness and her inevitable death as Anne awkwardly sidesteps an attempt by her star pupil  (played by Alexandre Tharaud) to address her declining health.

Later, we see the bed ridden Anne refuse to look in the mirror after a nurse brushes her hair – the pain of her physical decline is too hard to bear.

Like the couple Binoche and Auteuil portray in 'Hidden', there's also a sense from the off that this couple is under siege from some outside threat – almost all of the action is confined to their apartment.

This sense of danger from some unknown external force manifests itself in the early section of the film following an attempted break-in at their apartment at the start of the movie to more disturbing imagery later on.

And yet through all the grim realism, Haneke manages to wring out moments of humour and visual poetry from this most depressing of situations – Georges' account of a funeral he attends to Anne is particularly amusing.

In the anchor roles, Trintignant and Riva are simply mesmerising.

As Georges, Trintignant shuffles around his apartment, looking slightly unkempt in a beat up pair of trainers hopelessly devoted to his wife and struggling manfully.

Eighty-five year-old Riva's transformation into a woman hurtling towards death is as remarkable a physical performance as you will see from any actor – male or female - this year and it is no surprise that she has already been named Best Actress by the European Film Awards, the Boston and LA Film Critics Circles.

Unobtrusively shot with great discipline by the Iranian cinematographer Darius Khondji (who has worked with David Fincher and Woody Allen), Haneke, his cameraman and Trintignant conjure up a moment of magic when a pigeon flies into the couple's apartment in a sequence that will simply captivate audiences.

Every now and again we need a reminder that cinema must be more than just rollercoaster thrills and spills. 

At its best, cinema should challenge us about life itself – our outlook, our expectations.

And with this movie, Michael Haneke, his cast and crew should be applauded for doing just that.

Haneke has crafted a movie about ageing and death that is not condescending but is brutally honest and it can rightly take it's place alongside Ozu's 'Tokyo Story' as a classic.

(This review originally appeared on the eamonnmallie.com website. 'Amour' was released in the UK and Ireland on November 16, 2012)