Αγάπη

kayla4.0

Devastating and honestly hard to watch. I’m literally horrified of becoming an old person

DirkH5.0

Jarring, moving, confrontational, emotive and deeply sincere. Any great piece of art should possess one or more of these qualities and Haneke's film simply possesses them all. And for me personally, I'd like to add soul searing.I am not that familiar with Haneke's work and the films I have seen by his hand range from brilliant to boring for me. But they all have one thing in common, they are relentless to their audience and their themes. It is therefore intriguing by default when someone like Haneke decides to explore love. This is a story that excels in its simplicity. What happens when life long lovers face the inevitable, death? How do they cope? In many a writer's hand, this notion would have turned into a shallow, melodramatic affair. Not so here. Haneke's film and script allow no room for romanticism, no free pass for cheap manipulation and certainly no breathing space for the audience's hearts. Make absolutely no mistake, this film is absolutely devastating to watch.One could argue that this film is boring as not that much happens for a long time. Haneke's way of filming makes us observers, silent ghosts that happen to pass through the final stages of a couple's life. We see everything from the mundane to the life altering, we are allowed glimpses of their past and, most importantly, we get to know them. There are moments where I wished I could look away, but Haneke doesn't allow that. There were moments where I wished I could intervene, offer comfort, do something. If you, like me, embrace this couple's plight wholeheartedly, this is what this film will do to you.The two central performances are, simply put, transcendent. They surpass that realm of performers performing. They simply are, it's as simple as that. The main reason this film works is because they completely immersethemselves in the roles. Their performances are sincere, genuine and daring. And they kind of wrecked me.Love is a word with the shallowest connotations. It has been commercialised and for the better part lost all its meaning. It is therefore that in film it often gets the same treatment. It is also, however, the basest of human emotions in all its guises. It is something that should fuel life, be it familial or romantic. What makes this film so beautiful is that it shows love in its fully developed beauty. This is old love, almost a natural symbiosis. And seeing that bond being slowly ripped to shreds by the frailty of the human body is absolutely heartbreaking. Haneke does not shy away from the ugliness of such a union. He dares show the selfish nature of the fear of being alone as well. This is perhaps best shown in a scene I feel every filmmaker should watch to learn something about conveying drama. It is the scene where the husband tries to make the wife drink something. Everything beautiful and ugly about human nature is present in that one short scene. If you've seen the film, you know what I mean. I love the fact that we really get to know these people. We get to see snippets of their past life through conversations with friends and family. These are gentle, erudite, dare I say, realistic characters. They share a passion for music that, throughout the film, provides a window out of their misery. Their story is one I am glad I witnessed, even if it made me feel miserable to my bones.I am hesitant to say this, but I am going to do it anyway. This is an important film. It explores what we are, it doesn't condone or condemn, it relates human nature. It is as beautiful as it is ugly, showing the elated to the mundane and everything in between. It is deserving of a place in cinema's canon as it is a startling depiction of what makes us human.

Peaceful Stoner5.0

Georges Laurent does not shed a tear. Age is the greatest sculptor of all. When young, we are afraid, but we pretend not, of what punches life might throw at us. We are afraid of the future, we are afraid of Death, not of our own but of our beloved ones. Age, apart from wilting the physicality and deteriorating the health, infuses great determination and gives humans the solidity to face the pains of life and death unlike any other. Age cleanses us of rashness and enlightens our life with equanimity. Age makes us lose our physical beauty, only to give rise to the truest form of soulful love. Aging is always seen as a one of the greatest enigmas of human life. It is mostly blamed for the superficial miseries it causes. But the way it changes a human being and gives him strength to accept the inevitability of life on earth is always underwhelmed. How aging is the most under-appreciated gift of all is described with great realism and subtlety in Michael Haneke’s lifetime achievement.This is Haneke’s love letter to love itself and to the beauty and essentiality of human aging. This is a matured and explicitly honest look at the life of an aging couple. How they deal with the ineluctability of their future with calmness and composure gave me a sense of great admiration towards them and gave a greater sense of imperturbability within myself. Haneke’s method of using rigid camera positions and static shots are put to full use here as I was felt locked up with Georges and Anne and the twilight events of their love filled lives. Their lives are shown in full detail. Even the minute parts of everyday life are highlighted here. There is no back ground music at all, none, zilch. And there is a reason to it all. By showing all these seemingly inessential activities without any music, the story unnoticeably creeps up on our subconscious and gives us a feeling of experiencing real life events and not mere actors performing on screen. His cinematography is like a candid camera placed in their house and making us watch their happiness, memories, sorrow, frustration, pain and their lives unfold before us. Such was the beautiful weaving of it with the characters and place; such were the performances of the Trintignant and Riva. This method of story-telling became most effective and hit me real hard when I got to experience the shocking event later in the film.Another thing which I like about Amour is that there are absolutely no diversions. Like his camera, his storyline too focuses all its concentration on a singular plot without any meandering sub plots introduced for the sake of melodrama. This works brilliantly here as we see the couple and we see only them for the entire length. We see other people too but Haneke makes us see those appendages from the view point of Georges and Anne and hence we never move away from them. He never lets us to move away from them. There is absolutely no wavering. I reinstate that this is the reason why I shed tears during the finale even though Georges never flinched and remained resolute. He had age on his side. I am 50 years younger than him. That is why I cried and he did not.The ending is one of the most superiorly poetic I have ever witnessed. It shows how one can be true to his love even after death. How a person can live with his loved one even after their death. It also gave me hope that age and life experience would definitely make me a person like Georges Laurent. The man is one of the strongest and truest persons I have ever seen. He never winced when The Light of His Life was disappearing. He never forgot her even when he was in the dark.Death for Georges is just like a photograph. It is just a moment. It can capture his life for just a moment and cannot make him grieve all his remaining life. That moment passes. He lets it pass. The love and soul of his beloved wife will always remain with him. He knows and has always known that Death can never deprive him of that. That is what the miracle of aging has done to him. That is what true love has done to him. He remains true to his love whatever comes.This, in my opinion, is Haneke’s best work and the culmination of a person's admiration for life and love. It would be solemnly poetic if this remains his best work, because it deserves to be. Amour is one of the most realistic, sincerest and extremely honest tributes to love I have ever seen.