Amour

If you utter “la mort" slowly and let it slide off your tongue, it sounds like “l'amour.” Try it. Michael Haneke’s film, Amour, currently at Film Forum, plays with this sonority since it’s about the most cherished and dreaded of life processes. The image of Anne (Emannuelle Riva), an ailing concert pianist falling into the arms of her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) as he takes her to the bathroom, is one of love and death. Amour is an autopsy of death and its unsettling intimacy lies in the way it paints the little moments, the intimacies of decline. Stillness is Haneke’s music and most encounters in Amour (as in the director’s previous film, The White Ribbon) lead to some form of set piece. Anne tells him to turn off a CD. Then Haneke frames the couple, her wheelchair in profile against him, and holds the shot. Georges is a storyteller and the vignettes he relates become like signposts— not act I, act II, act III, but stone markers on a trail. Amidst the ghastly and at the same time quotidian goings on, Georges attends a friend’s funeral. Anne wants to hear about it and it’s to the director’s credit that he’s able to pull off a laugh-out-loud funny scene. Apparently George’s friend’s urn is too large for the gurney it’s placed on and the friend’s secretary in a moment of passion decides to play the Beatles’s “Yesterday.” The priest who gives the eulogy turns out to be an utter fool. As George concludes what amounts to a very good standup routine, Anne announces that she doesn’t want to live. The diagnosis of Haneke’s characters is critical and their fate inevitable, but the genius and humanity of the film is that its disquisition is never predictable.

The White Ribbon

Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon has already been exterminated, exfoliated and hermaneuticized, and will undoubtedly be the subject of numerous PhD theses. But let’s cut to the chase. The film’s historical context, the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarejevo, immediately forces the viewer to pluck out his or her retrospectroscope. Should the viewer call to mind Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which throws cold water on the banality-of-evil theory invoked by Hannah Arendt in Eichman in Jerusalem, or turn to Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power to understand the impending sense of doom and horror that grows amidst Haneke’s astonishing, unflinchingly beautiful set pieces? Christian Berger’s cinematography owes more to Zeno and Parmenides of the Eleatic School of pre-Socratic philosophy than to film-school technique, as his black and white shots strive towards a prison-like stasis. It is almost disturbing to detect motion in some of the compositions, which are interrupted by movements so discreet that we at first mistake them for trompe l’oeil.

   

Etiology and innocence are the themes that Haneke (The Piano Player, Caché) is playing with, and his mise en scène is virtually inextricable from the narration. The oppressive luminescence of sunlight on snow is one of the recurring images in this exploration of human sadism and childhood’s lack of innocence. The butchering of an already crippled bird, the torture of two children (one retarded), the tripping of a horse and rider, an adolescent put to sleep with his hands tied to preempt masturbation—these are just a few of the images woven into a tapestry of evil that becomes a work of great beauty. Evil beauty is not an oxymoron if we consider The Divine Comedy, or Nancy Milford’s book about Edna St. Vincent Millay, Savage Beauty. Emily Dickinson's memorable line, “Split the lark and you’ll find the music,” gives a hint what Haneke’s getting at, only in this case it’s the music that leads to a dead bird. One can’t help can’t help but think of Bergman’s Winter Light. Haneke’s stern pastor is a dead ringer for Gunnar Bjornstand, who plays a similar role in the Bergman film. The two cinematic personae are due for a tête a tête.