With a dramatic opening showing police breaking into the empty apartment and discovering the wife's deceased body surrounded by flowers, the film then backtracks to establish our characters: Georges and Anne. One day while eating breakfast, Anne simply freezes - unresponsive to her husband's calls. A stroke. There is nothing overly dramatic about the moment. From that point on, we watch the painfully slow digression of Anne and Georges's diligent care and protection of her.
The film does not serve a plot. This is a movie about life and the people we know. So often we hear about the elderly succumbing to sickness and death - how often do we wonder what these people used to be? Anne receives a visit from a pupil of hers, now a famous concert pianist. He asks about her apparent illness, and Anne quickly orders a change of subject. Georges, late in the film, sits in solitude listening to a piano recording and recalls a memory of her sitting at their piano, deep in focus.
Haneke has a true sense of filmmaking and each of his scenes are gems in and of themselves. His cast is no less impressive, with Jean-Louis Trintignant so brilliantly carrying the film alongside Emmanuelle Riva, now the oldest Oscar nominee for acting since the Oscar's inception. The eerie realness with which she captures a woman trapped in a stroke victim's body is uncanny, and the amount of emotion she can convey just with her eyes is shocking.
Of course this film will find its audience, and that is not everyone. At over two hours, this is a film that requires patience, and respect. This could have easily been an overlooked film, but thanks to the deserved Oscar nominations perhaps a wider audience will come to see this film. Heartbreaking and honest, Amour left an indelible mark on me.
(Awards potential: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Trintignant), Best Actress (Riva), Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Foreign Language Film)
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