Film review: Amour, by Michael Haneke, 2012. Title: Fragments of decomposition, by Pablo Gonçalo. “Não faças poesia com o corpo, esse excelente, completo e confortável corpo, tão infenso à efusão lírica”. Carlos Drummond de Andrade Do not make poetry with the body.
This excellent, complete and comfortable body, so unfit for lyrical flow. (Carlos Drummond de Andrade).. This story could happen in any city. An elderly couple withdraws. They become recluses. They do not answer the phone. They do not want visitors. “No” is their word. They are not up to talking. They are tired of other people, of themselves, of the streets, of their neighbors, of possible cures. Her name is Dorine. For years she has suffered from a degenerative disease. Hopeless, her husband André takes care of her in a totally different way than what the doctors recommended. They are both exhausted. They can no longer stand all the medicines and their countless side effects. He makes a calculated decision to write a last poetic letter. He writes to D., to himself, to whomever. He seals the letter and puts it on their doorstep. He locks the house. Side by side, they close their eyes. This could be the story of Amour, Michael Haneke’s latest film. It could be, but it is not. It is a synopsis of the book “Letter for D.”, written by the French philosopher André Gorz a few days before he and his wife, side by side, killed themselves. It is a love story, a romantic, possibly platonic love that became an international best seller. The movie and book have several plot convergences. However, Haneke does not portray romantic love. Markedly pessimist, as are the all the works of this Austrian director, the film does not treat love as transcendent, ethereal, or eternal, referring to a mythical past or a future redemption. With Haneke, the flowers of love are nipped in the bud. Like an editor’s straight cut in cinema. Why then, the word “love” in the title? Besides facing death head on, Amour is a film about the body and the matter that connect us to the world. Haneke films old bodies that are flawed and slowly decomposing. The corrosion eats away at the pores of their skin in every corner of the apartment. The degenerative disease that plagues Anne, played by Emmanuelle Riva, dramatically represents the waning body. In the scene where her symptoms appear, she enters into a trance that is not mystical, but rather void, and which takes her nowhere. Although the character is absent, its matter continues pulsing, which is accentuated by the subtle sound design of running water in the sink, indifferent to such human sufferings. Haneke films the everyday aspects of body decomposition. As if Anne now lives in a time that is opposite to that lived by the virtuoso pianist who visits her and was once her student. Hesitant and shaky, her hands cannot approach the piano, can no longer flirt with the sublime awakened by music. Like precise editing, this everyday life emerges as regimented and full of codes, trying in vain to soothe the morbid suffering. Throughout the film one never knows how much time has passed between days, or even in a single day. Like the clock without hands in one of Bergman’s films. The innocuous wait for that final instant. Little by little, everyday life reveals its awful face, counting down the seconds and playing against you. Similar to “The death of Ivan IIyich”, by Tolstoi – a novel brilliantly adapted in Pasolini’s “Teorema” where death comes slowly and does not allow a coherent and dramatic plot, a logical synopsis, or a final lesson. In his last letter George says almost nothing relevant. Death comes – a fragment, fragmenting, indifferent to the comforts of religious sentiment, loved ones, or family. On the other hand, the dying are the most aware of the hypocritical theater surrounding them. Haneke subtly goes against some contemporary trends. Death and body both tend to be uncomfortable subjects, especially when seen through the lens of old age. A remarkable example of this trend is found in the words of Raymond Kurzweil, a “futurist” and Silicon Valley guru. In “Transcendental Man”, a biopic about Kurzweil, he claims that after 2029 it will be possible to avoid death forever. Yes, the utopia of immortality and eternal youth would indeed be close. From a technological point of view, this means the combination of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and robotics. According to Kurzweill, this combination would produce total fusion between human bodies and sophisticated robots, the apex of “post-organic man”. It is what Kurzweil calls “spiritual machines”. These claims still generate some surprise, but they are accepted enthusiastically by a host of followers. These are symptomatic revelations of a desire to overcome the "human condition" and experience a final metamorphosis - or life forms that go beyond body and death. In Amour, as shown through Haneke’s lenses, this technological rhetoric sounds pathetic. Medical advances were nothing more than palliatives that created new dangers and new powers. Anne is the one living this. Not per chance, she asks George to never leave her in a hospital again, claiming that the “total institution” is a hideous place. Anne prefers to die at home away from all the apparatuses. The technology seems to stalk in vain, as filmed in the beautiful scene where Anne discovers her electric wheelchair. The wheelchair spins around and around, like in a vicious circle, and at first glance it seems fun. However, when the game ends Anne notices the emptiness that surrounds her. Haneke’s Amour might suggest a subtle and interesting turning point in his work. In this film, his verve for the tragic and violent walks side-by-side with a poetic affection that is interwoven in the details of the narrative. It might be clarified, however, that this affection does not mean something nice or friendly. Affection here comes in the gesture that asks for affection. With Haneke, it comes as a slap in the face, as if the surprise of the impact cries for real interaction. Although it sounds paradoxical, it is in this gesture that love resides in this Haneke film. It is in this hiatus of violence and affection that the masks of the couple, until then laden by routine and rancor, seem to drop. The slap, along with the broad landscapes of the paintings highlighted by the editing, causes a turning point. They understand each other better and respect the demands and limits of other. Communication, childhood, and negation are three other recurring themes in Haneke’s dramaturgy that are portrayed from a new perspective in Amour. In his interviews Haneke claims that he writes stories about the lack of communication in close relationships. The more intimate the relationship, more silent and complicated. Little by little the code pales and becomes unknown. In Amour the culmination of the couple’s communication occurs when Anne’s speaking ability disappears. It is as if, when she stops talking, she asks for acknowledgement. This leads to the poignant scene where they haltingly sing together, "Sur les ponts d'Avignon", a traditional French song. Gradually, the communication becomes the serene meeting of hands. The affection of the slap unfolds into the affection of gesture, with hands as accomplices. That song also evokes childhood, which is usually associated to the idea of purity. However, in Haneke’s idea of childhood, children and teenagers walk the swampy terrains of amorality. One need only remember the protagonist in Benny’s Video, or the group of young boys in The White Ribbon. Childhood in these films is not an isolated theme. They are always relational and point to the parents. In his essay, “The Unhappy Young”, Pasolini realizes that the children in Greek tragedies inherit their parents’ misfortunes. In Haneke’s dramaturgy the amorality of children is only a shadow of their parents’ nihilism. All these issues seem to merge in the gesture of denial, which are so defining in the characters in the film. Negation is an act of resistance, like in The Seventh Continent, an interesting film from the beginning of Haneke’s career, where, before collectively committing suicide, a family rips up and throws all the money they had accumulated in the toilet. Negation is not just normal pessimism. It is a vehement decision to not participate in or collaborate with a society that you totally disagree with from beginning to end. This kind of negation is influenced by some of Schopenhauer’s concepts and echoes Austrian writers such as Robert Musil and Peter Handke. But above all it is Thomas Bernhard, in his romance, "Extinction", that offers the essence of denial, like the inside out of the inside out of a Bildungsroman. Bernhard praises the moral strength derived from physical decay and the urgent destruction of all social codes to try and salvage something from the ruins - and collapse. In Amour, negation occurs when the couple decides to die together. If, in this act, the characters show any resistance toward their daughter or the audience, it explodes like a hammer. The smell of death - maybe this is what Haneke interweaves so sinuously throughout his film. A strong fragrance dense, impregnated in the carpet, the sheets, the curtains. A smell appreciated only by crows.