Man. Um... yeah.

This is a typically Haneke-ian flick. Cold, methodical, unsentimental to the max. But it's about subject matter-- the cruel indignity that comes with the eventual death of your loved ones-- that is inherently quite sentimental.

It's executed pretty flawlessly. The performances are top drawer. The structure is meticulously crafted. Every moment resonates.

I wasn't particularly moved by the love that defines our life, as there's not a great deal of focus on that-- instead, the focus is on the slow march to the grave. The first 45 minutes is more unsentimentally affectionate (if that makes sense) than watching a woman with a stroke scream as her husband struggles to cling to sanity. Which, naturally, made me prefer that section of the film. I don't like watching horrible things to watch.

Still, it's a master class in structure, acting, and how to deal with sentimental subject matter in an unsentimental way. And it's most definitely worth seeing.

Yeah holy fuck

I love Haneke and I'm used to seeing movies made by him that are hard to watch but jesus christ. This kind of fucked me up. What a remarkable film and what incredible performances.

I hope it wins everything for which it has been nominated -- but Longo, can you imagine the reaction of the average American if they went to see it on the badis of a best picture win? People's brains would explode.


~ ~ ~
All meetings end in separation
All acquisition ends in dispersion
All life ends in death
- The Buddha

|\_/|
='_'=

Every hundred years, all new people

I won't say it touched my heart the way I thought it would, as Haneke just stays so cold. But it absolutely riveted the intellectual film snob in me, marveling as every single decision was so precise and so on the money.

And when you compare it to, say, Silver Linings Playbook, which is tremendously sloppy, or even films I really liked such as Beasts of the Southern Wild, with its emotional imagery explosion, or Zero Dark Thirty, with its intentional methodical pacing? It's so different. Haneke takes the time to choose every line, shot, and movement with amazing intention. It's fun to watch. (Not fun, but, you know.)

perfectly crafted catnip to film snobs, but otherwise a spectacular waste of everyone else's time. it's one of those films where people come out of it so proud to have sat through a long, pretentious french film they only halfway understood that they rave about it to all their friends. but the raves aren't about the quality of the film itself, they're about-- like the spilled lattes have turned into-- bragging on which boring and obscure films they've successfully sat through, adding notches to a belt no one cares about. but like i said, it's to haneke's credit that he's created a film that caters perfectly to the "desperate to look smart and cultured" crowd. his oscar nod is one of the greater frauds perpetrated on the american public, though i admire it in the way i admire the cold precision and guile of a bernie madoff.

as for the film itself, listen, if you want to spend two hours watching an old man chase a pigeon around an apartment, go for it. that's on you. i can assure you your friends will be supremely impressed. if that's not something that appeals to you, or your friends are regular people who don't spend their days blogging from a starbucks window, go see identity theft instead. melissa mccarthy is a revelation.

look, amour is indeed, as others have said, a long slow march to the grave. the very first scene is the discovery of anne's body, laid out on their apartment bed, adorned lovingly with flowers. so as we later watch anne and georges fighting against and remaining in a good deal of denial about the inevitable, we know without a doubt that it is the inevitable. this is an interesting idea in theory, but it ends up being the fatal flaw of this film. people are applauding haneke's stark and unsentimental treatment of death, but in real life we don't get this God's eye view. in real life, we don't know our loved ones will die, even when we do know. we're anne and georges, going through the motions at one time, trying to grab one last moment in another. we're their daughter, questioning whether everything possible is being done, wondering whether a decision (or inaction) today will be regretted tomorrow in an empty room. but the beauty and pain of life that this film misses from the beginning is the hope. and the false hope. the not knowing. amour reads us the last page first, thus placing a cold artificiality over everything that follows.

this also has the effect of making the subsequent two hours one of the most tedious film experiences in recent memory. we know exactly where this is all going and yet it never seems to get there. georges tells long boring stories that go nowhere, he walks at an old man's shuffling pace from one end of their rather large apartment to the other and we follow him in one long take, he has dreams that mean nothing and add nothing and are never spoken of again, he chases pigeons around his apartment in long-take sequences that go on about ten minutes past their expiration date, he writes letters that are never explained to people we don't know, he buys several bouquets of flowers and we watch as he cuts the stems of two of them. not two flowers, two bouquets. individually. and slowly. one stem at a time. by the time georges takes matters into his own hands, we're rooting for him to do it. we were rooting for him to do it an hour ago. we have completely surrendered to the tedium and pretentiousness of the film.

emmanuelle riva is really good in this. i get the awards buzz. she plays a dying old lady and gets naked at one point. i get it. her best acting moment comes as she's getting her diaper changed (that's not a joke), but for me she didn't possess the can't-take-your-eyes-off-her magnetism of other performances we've seen this year. and jean-louis trintignant was just as good, albeit in the less juicy role. the acting is fine, which i'd refer to as the "saving grace" of this film if that were true. it's not. it's still not worth your time.

so, listen, you've got better things to do than this. you really do. we've all had grandparents or parents die, often slowly. we don't need to spend two hours watching that scenario played out again by people we don't care about in a series of painfully drawn-out, poorly-crafted long-takes. if seeing pretentious french films and bragging about it to your friends is that important to you, just spend 15 minutes reading some reviews and lie about seeing it. no one will ever know.

I wasn't emotionally taken with the film the way others are, and I can totally understand finding it boring and obvious and "overly artsy"... but it is well-constructed, cmon. From the script to the framing to the ending they build to.

I understand disliking the film, and disliking Haneke in general. But the craft on display is definitely deliberate, meticulous, and well-thought-out.

there's no reason to watch an old man chase a pigeon around a room for five minutes. none. first of all, what was the point of it? second, why do we have to witness it in real time? what does that tell us that a one-minute montage wouldn't? there's a reason why God invented these things called cuts. it's so we can watch an old man spend five minutes chasing a pigeon around a room without actually having to spend five real-time minutes watching an old man chase a pigeon around a room. there's a way to advance time in films so as not to waste your audience's time on drawn-out sequences that do nothing to advance the narrative or character development. sequences that exist for no other reason than to wear us down and force us into the same dreary hopelessness as the characters. i don't have time for it. make your point some other way.

and for the record, it's specifically these long takes that i called poorly crafted (the film itself i called "perfectly crafted catnip for snobs"). the first major one, where anne zones out and georges walks from one end of the apartment to the other, kind of worked because there were things happening. problem was, they happened WAY too slowly. a better director would've gotten the point across in half the time. for the most part, haneke's long takes consist of him setting up a camera on a tripod in the corner of a room and sitting on his hands while his characters do nothing interesting for five minutes. i imagine he spent entire days of shooting where all he did was glance up from his cafe au lait every 45 seconds or so to say, "uh-huh. yeah, keep doing that." just because that choice is deliberate doesn't make it good.

but I didn't get the pigeon either.

In a symbolic sense, of course. If that makes any sense...

not really, but that explanation makes as much sense as any other. the fact that no one knows what all that was about, considering the incredible amount of time spent on it, is a failure on haneke's part.

It keeps lingering on the windowsill. Waiting.

Finally, it gets in. And you can't keep it from staying. The old man does his little dance... but keeping death out forever is a hopeless endeavor. Inevitably, that pigeon will get back in.

Plus, it's just really fun to say The Pigeon of Death.

FOH.

*hands you a starbucks gift card*

>it's one of those
>films where people come out of it so proud to have sat through
>a long, pretentious french film they only halfway understood
>that they rave about it to all their friends.

How is this film pretentious? It is a very direct film about a couple dealing with one of them dying. Pretentious does not mean slow.

Just say you find it boring. No one will think you are less smart.


>but the raves
>aren't about the quality of the film itself, they're about--
>like the spilled lattes have turned into-- bragging on which
>boring and obscure films they've successfully sat through,
>adding notches to a belt no one cares about.

So if someone told you, as I am doing now, that they were genuinely moved by the film and uninterested in bragging about going through some ordeal, would you say I was lying?

Who is bragging about seeing this movie like they've just eaten the world's spiciest chile? Film snobs have their faults, but pretending to like movies that everyone secretly finds boring is not one of them.


> but like i said,
>it's to haneke's credit that he's created a film that caters
>perfectly to the "desperate to look smart and cultured" crowd.

I saw it with a crowd of 80% people over 65. Pretty sure they could care less about looking smart and cultured. I think they were genuinely interested in the subject matter and craft. And, judging by their emotional state and conversations afterwards, were generally moved. Were they cranking out the tears hoping I'd take their photo and blog about it later?


> his oscar nod is one of the greater frauds perpetrated on the
>american public, though i admire it in the way i admire the
>cold precision and guile of a bernie madoff.

Yes, you got him. Michael Haneke, the slick con man. His filmography is full of shameless Oscar bait. When will the American public catch on to this trickster?

look at the title, fam. they named the film "love." there's your first clue.

i'm not gonna argue with you about your reaction to the film. you say you were moved by it, i'm not gonna tell you you weren't. there were some genuinely moving sequences, the leads gave moving performances. there are elements of a good film here. in fact, i think you could edit this down (moving some stuff around) into a really good short film. 30, 40 minutes tops. dragging it out over two hours is indefensible. it's boring your audience in the name of art and wasting everyone's time.

your audience of AARP members enjoyed it, great. they probably self-edited it with some well-timed naps. there's a good 90 minutes of amour you could sleep through and miss nothing. i wish i would've. but my audience was crickets. over two hours, the film got two reactions: a laugh when anne asked georges what he would say if no one came to his funeral and he responded "probably nothing"; and a gasp at the end of the dream sequence. that's it. over two hours. everything else was crickets, including the end credits. that's poor filmmaking.

>look at the title, fam. they named the film "love." there's
>your first clue.

It's about two old people who love each other. "Love" seems direct and appropriate.

Now it if was an American film called Amour--that's pretentious. Or if it was called "The Unbearable Beauty of Love in the Twilight Moments," that would also be pretentious.

I suppose Haneke could have called it "Old Folks Dying" but you have to get people in the theater.



>i'm not gonna argue with you about your reaction to the film.
>you say you were moved by it, i'm not gonna tell you you
>weren't. there were some genuinely moving sequences, the
>leads gave moving performances. there are elements of a good
>film here. in fact, i think you could edit this down (moving
>some stuff around) into a really good short film. 30, 40
>minutes tops. dragging it out over two hours is indefensible.
> it's boring your audience in the name of art and wasting
>everyone's time.

I think that's a totally valid reaction to the film. I just think you could have called it boring and bloated without accusing people who liked it of being pretentious/hipster/fake showoffs.

>> his oscar nod is one of the greater frauds perpetrated on
>the
>>american public, though i admire it in the way i admire the
>>cold precision and guile of a bernie madoff.
>
>Yes, you got him. Michael Haneke, the slick con man. His
>filmography is full of shameless Oscar bait. When will the
>American public catch on to this trickster?

Pretty much. I understand not liking the flick, but Haneke is as far from this kind of guy as possible.

makes me know I do not need to see this film. Which means your post was clear and well thought out, good thing. I've seen enough Haneke films to know he's not for me

the professional just confirmed it for me with his post as well

and quite effective when it needed to be.

not something I would see again though.

The biggest running theme seemed to be doors. Doors locked, unlocked, opened, closed. It starts out with the police forcing doors open...Their door gets broken into by an intruder....George is constantly opening and closing doors and windows throughout the whole movie. The pigeon comes in through a window. And then the movie ends with every single door in the apartment ajar for the first time making what seemed like a somewhat claustrophobic apartment suddenly seem spacious and open. Interesting.

Anyone thinking about getting married.

I love how it's not interested in trying to artificially jerk your tears. So many moments where he could have added big emotional outbursts, but restrained.

Would be interesting to revisit this movie years in the future when my life is in a different stage, but yeahhh that's not happening.