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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 smack clowns with nouns, punch herbs with verbs..."
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