"AMOUR" - THE FILM

To whoever recommended the film "Amour" to me: Thanks and no thanks. What a wrenching emotional workout! The film is superb in every way, direction, acting, cinematography. To say the movie is depressing is weak; I asked myself more than once, "Why do I continue watching? I don't know how much more I can take."

The title is an apt description, for the movie is the love story of a cultivated and sophisticated man and woman, both music teachers, who have been married for many years and now have grown old together. We briefly see their pleasant lives before, Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), the wife, suffers a stroke. Even in the scenes before the tragedy, we sense with foreboding that what follows will not be pleasant for either Anne or her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant.

The writer and director, Michael Haneke, unflinchingly and without sentimentality, depicts the reality of life for the caregiver and the cared-for after disabling tragedy strikes. Haneke does not fear scenes of lingering silence, nor does he scorn blackouts, which go on longer than the viewer expects. Except for the scenes at the beginning, the movie is filmed entirely within the couple's apartment. The setting does not feel unreasonably constrained, for Anne and Georges live their lives within the constricted space, except for brief ventures out which are mentioned but not shown.
 
 Riva and Trintignant are brilliant in their roles. Often without words, we read in their faces their intense love for each other, the severe tests of the strength of that love, and their shared humiliations. The actors, both in their 80s, have not lost the golden touch.
 
 Their daughter, Eva, (Isabelle Huppert) cares about her parents, but she faces challenges in her own life and, though somewhat perplexed, she seems to understand and perhaps envy her parents' devotion to each other - that devotion which effectively excludes intimacy with anyone else, even their own daughter.

The movie is brilliant in its every aspect, but it hit at least this one viewer with a hard emotional punch that I would not want to repeat every day.

LE HAVRE - THE FILM

A couple of evenings ago, I watched the lovely, gentle, humorous, yet suspenseful movie, Le Havre. The film is in French with subtitles, which is off-putting to some, but deliver me from dubbed.  I have no problem with subtitles, and I use them sometimes for films with English actors, because I have hearing loss, and I don't always catch all the words.  I understood some of the French, but the English subtitles were there when I needed them.

The movie is beautifully done in every way.  The writer-director, Aki Kaurismäki, is Finnish, and it seems to me that European movie-makers have less fear of moments of silence than their counterparts in the US.  The actors, all of them, are very good, especially André Wilms as Marcel Marx and Blondin Miguel as Idrissa, the young stowaway from Africa.  There's a sweetness that does not cloy about the film in the way the people in the shabby neighborhood care for each other in troubled times, a virtue which we seem to be in danger of losing, at least here in the US, and a tenderness toward the young African boy.  Though it's a quiet movie, I was entranced every moment as I watched.  Kati Outinen as Arletty, Marcel's wife, was excellent, too.  Laika, Marcel's dog in the film, plays herself.  Lovely.

Certain of the critics, most of them in fact, call the movie a comedy, but I would not go so far, although humor and irony abound.  Watch for the benefit performance by the aging rocker.  Though the director is Finnish, the movie seemed very French to me.  I like what Rob Thomas, of the Capital Times (Madison, WI) says of the film:

It is rare and welcome to watch a movie that automatically assumes people will do the right thing at the slightest provocation.