Amour

[wilder]

Georges and Anne are in their eighties. They are cultivated, retired music teachers. Their daughter, who is also a musician, lives abroad with her family. One day, Anne has an attack. The couple's bond of love is severely tested.

Written and Directed by Michael Haneke
Release Date - December 19, 2012 (limited)

[Drenk]

It was not good at all. The script is a translation into french; so when you speak french, it's difficult to stand the way they talk. It must be better with subtitles...Haneke is cold, you don't believe anything. The character of the daughter, you just can't believe her relation with her parents. Oh, and I hate Isabelle Huppert, it doesn't help. Trintignant is great, but the script is bad, so it sounds bad and I don't know why he accepted, with his talent, to say these lines...There is one fantastic scene in the film and that's all.

PS: Haneke must stop with the long-takes, he doesn't know what to show.

[wilder]

Michael Haneke: There's no easy way to say this...
via The Guardian

Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or-winning film Amour will strike some as brutal, as its elderly characters grapple with the indignities of ageing. The director proves a challenging subject to interview as he evades and obstructs – much like his films

Michael Haneke likes to say that his films are easier to make than to watch. Cast and crew have fun, but he expects his audience to be disturbed, affronted, even sickened. "On the set I make jokes," he said when we met in Paris to discuss Amour, which deservedly won him the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. "I can't get too involved, or it turns into sentimental soup. I try to keep it light."

What he tried to alleviate while making Amour was a grim anatomy of elderly debility and dementia, complete with incontinence, forced feeding and the eventual stench of putrefaction. The film follows the decline of an octogenarian musician, who after a stroke is nursed at home by her adoring but increasingly angry and bewildered husband. The roles are played, as Haneke said, by "two great actors who go beyond acting. They both knew that this situation will concern them in their own lives in the very near future". Emmanuelle Riva is now 85, Jean-Louis Trintignant is 81; because films from the 1950s preserve their nubile youth – Riva in bed with her Japanese lover in Hiroshima Mon Amour, Trintignant worshipping the bosom of Bardot in And God Created Woman – it's alarming to see them now with stiff but fragile limbs and worn, sagging faces. Their anxiety is unfeigned, their injuries not acted. Riva had to strip naked for a scene in which a bossy nurse bathes her; she didn't believe, until the moment came, that Haneke was really going to oblige her to undress. Trintigant's arduous limp is the memento of a motorcycle accident, and to compound his afflictions he broke his hand during the filming.

Amour is stark and sometimes brutal, as you would expect from a director who specialises in emotional extremity. Haneke's The Seventh Continent is about the doggedly meticulous suicide of an entire family, Funny Games about the torture and slaughter of another household; The Piano Teacher studies the hang-ups of a heroine who slices her genitalia with a razor and begs to be whipped. But the new film has a grave compassion not seen before in his work. Its subject, as Haneke put it, is "How do I deal with the fact that someone I love is suffering?", and its private source is the agony of the aunt who brought Haneke up when his feckless parents, both actors, realised they had no talent for child-raising. At the age of 92, crippled by rheumatism, his aunt overdosed on sleeping pills. Haneke found her in time, and rushed her to the hospital. She had previously begged him to help her die; he pointed out that since he was her heir, he might have ended in prison. A year after her first attempt, she swallowed more pills and put herself out of her misery. Though the circumstances in Amour are different, Haneke passes on his personal dilemma to Trintignant, who copes in his own mad, heroic way.

Earlier Haneke films have dealt with a casual, motiveless murder in Benny's Video, and the indiscriminate shooting of a crowd in 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. But Amour examines dying, a process that is more protracted and much more upsetting to watch. There is less drama here, because the decay is predictable and wearily gradual. All the same, the climax of Amour is a scene that takes you by surprise and leaves you numb.

Probably, like me, you won't know whether to be outraged or moved to tears by what you see. Haneke mistrusts the idea of catharsis, and thinks that Hollywood films have prostituted it by supplying "false [because too quick] answers". That's why his own plots are unresolved: Hidden is a whodunnit which leaves us unsure who did what to whom, and his adaptation of Kafka's The Castle breaks off, like the unfinished novel, in the middle of a sentence. At the end of Amour, the daughter of Riva and Trintignant, played by Isabelle Huppert, returns to her parents' apartment to sit and silently ponder what has happened. She represents us; perhaps, Haneke said to me, she incarnates "our bad conscience", since we have paid to witness the pain of fictional characters. Is she experiencing catharsis, which is a kind of purgation? It depends on what you project on to her frozen face; all I know is that my own feelings about Amour, when I calmed down enough to sort them out, were composed in equal parts of the terror and pity that Aristotle thought were the aftermath of tragedy.

The man who devised these torments has a passing resemblance to El Greco's emaciated saints. Haneke dresses exclusively in black, offset by a waterfall of white hair. Although he refuses to appear in his own films – he casts his wife Susanne, an antique dealer, as an extra instead – he has said that he fancies playing a Capuchin monk, since they wear such stylish hoods. The remark catches his combination of asceticism and elegance: an American journalist once described him as "a haute-couture Gandalf", a wizard who is a little too fussy about his wardrobe.

Haneke made his name by berating the complacency and amnesia of his native Austria and deriding the glossy, spendthrift consumerism of American movies: he relished the scandal at Cannes in 1998 when audiences jeered as the family in The Seventh Continent, having smashed their household goods, flushed wads of money down the toilet. Yet the enemy of the bourgeoisie is impeccably bourgeois, and when I arrived for our meeting at a swanky hotel near the Arc de Triomphe, I found Haneke – just off a flight from Vienna, where he lives – tucking into a luxurious lunch in the restaurant. Unhappy about being glimpsed in a situation where he wasn't in control, he scuttled upstairs to his suite and then, after an interval, made an entrance in the room set aside for our interview.

I expected him to be detached, even haughty. Huppert, from whom Haneke extracted such a lacerating performance in The Piano Teacher, once called him "a curious combination of Robert Bresson and Alfred Hitchcock". Bresson in films like Pickpocket or A Man Escaped watches souls striving for redemption; Hitchcock in Psycho or Vertigo explores the incurably neurotic mind. Haneke mixes the contemplativeness of the one with the mischief and malice of the other. Like a god, he studies the world from a distance, unable to intervene, perhaps amused by the small, insignificant disasters he observes. Hence his fondness for placing the camera far away from its subjects: Hidden coolly watches as a child's small world falls apart, his cries muffled by the intervening space; and Code Unknown concludes by showing how life, likened by Haneke to a flea circus, indifferently unravels on a Paris boulevard.

In person he is affable enough, but he prefers to have his contact with reality mediated by a camera. On this occasion his buffer was a translator; although Haneke's English is serviceable, he insisted on a go-between. He listened impassively as I told him how the climax of Amour had astounded me. He didn't require a translation, but responded by asking, in a syrupy Viennese accent, "Was ist die Frage?" (What is the question?) He then sat back to enjoy his power and my flustered impotence. I began to understand the discomfort of his actors, who are obliged to play by his rules. Huppert had a tantrum when he refused to allow her to decide on the motives of her character in his apocalyptic fable The Time of the Wolf. Naomi Watts, whom he directed in the American remake of Funny Games, broke down in tears and protested that she was not a marionette as he bossily choreographed a scene in which she bustled about the kitchen. Haneke's ideal interpreter was the late Susanne Lothar, who played Watts's role as the excruciated wife in the original Austrian version of Funny Games. "She must have been masochistic," said Haneke approvingly, remembering that Lothar spent half an hour sobbing in her dressing room to prepare for one scene of abuse.

Haneke has a sly, sceptical awareness of the way the cinema manipulates us, passing off propaganda or advertising as reality. He is also, however, an arch manipulator. Given notice that this was to be an inquisition not a conversation, I rephrased my compliments and asked him a question about the startling climax of Amour. On principle he refused to answer. "Ah," he said, smirking as I tumbled into the trap, "you are asking me to interpret, and I will not. Every meaning is fine, all interpretations are OK. I do not choose between them, because I dislike explanations. It happened so with Juliette Binoche in Hidden. She asked me if the woman she played was having an affair with her colleague at work. There were two scenes together with this man: I told her to play one as if they were involved, the other as if they were not. I doubt that she found this to be helpful advice.

"We must allow,' he said, "for complexities and contradictions. When I am asked this kind of thing, I usually say I don't know the answer because I don't have such a good relationship with the author." He is of course himself the author, or auteur, since he writes all his films as well as directing them, so he was pleading lack of self-knowledge. He watched me fume for a moment, then giggled – a recurrent mannerism, perhaps an apology for his unco-operativeness, perhaps a signal of his temporary triumph.

There is a theory behind this game of hide and seek. His films argue against "the disempowerment of the spectator", which is why Amour begins at a piano recital where we survey the audience in the Théâtre des Champs Elysées but don't ever see the pianist. "I give the spectator the possibility of participating," Haneke said. "The audience completes the film by thinking about it; those who watch must not be just consumers ingesting spoon-fed images." I was reminded of a scene in Amour when Trintignant spoon-feeds Riva, which might be another of Haneke's little parables: she spits the liquid back in his face, and he slaps her. "A film cannot stop at the screen," said Haneke, repeating one of his mantras. "Cinema is a dialogue." But it's not a dialogue in which he wants to take part: while empowering spectators, he chooses to baffle or obfuscate interviewers. Another fusillade of giggles filled the silence as I started again.

I quoted a comment Trintignant makes in the film, when Huppert arrives to find she has been locked out of Riva's sickroom. Trintignant summarises the ghastly scene inside, and says "None of this deserves to be shown." If it can't be shown to the patient's daughter, how did Haneke justify exposing it to a crowd of strangers in a cinema? "A film can show everything," he said, retreating to an untested generalisation. "It is different if someone from within the family says this. You have only not to betray your idea of what is human behaviour, and not add misery to what is actually there." That didn't seem to me to be an answer, since Trintignant is not talking about a bedside visit but about the propriety of making a spectacle out of decay and death. More giggles covered Haneke's reluctance to continue.

I began to understand the reasons for his shiftiness. Amour extends Hitchcock's infringements of taboo in Psycho, which Haneke much admires. Hence Riva's ordeal in the bathroom, and another almost unwatchable moment that corresponds to the revelation of Mrs Bates rotting in the fruit cellar. (At least Riva was still able to act, which gave her a way of defending herself; by contrast Haneke cast Annie Girardot as a doddering matriarch in Hidden at a time when Alzheimer's disease had left her unsure of who she was.) Haneke makes us witness things from which we would usually avert our eyes. Is he doing so to cater to our prurience, as when Huppert visits the peep show in The Piano Teacher and sniffs a semen-caked tissue she picks from a bin while watching a gross, grunting video of copulation? Or is he punishing us by compelling us to confront mortality, as the young boy in The White Ribbon does when he studies a corpse?

Haneke expects films to cause nightmares. When first taken to the cinema at the age of six to see Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, he began screaming in terror and had to be ushered out. After seeing Pasolini's Sadean epic Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, he remembers feeling nauseated for a month: that was the highest compliment he could pay the film's anthology of perverse and repellent sexual tableaux. In the past, he has had no compunction about admitting his sadistic motives. "I've been accused of 'raping' the audience," he said in 2006, "and I admit to that freely. All movies assault the viewer in one way or another." He added, rather snakily: "I'm trying to rape the viewer into independence."

When Haneke directed Don Giovanni at the Paris Opéra in 2007, he turned Mozart's blithe seducer into a psychopathic rapist who ripped the clothes from one of his victims and violated her onstage. Haneke explained away the act metaphorically: his Don Giovanni was a pumped-up financier in an office tower, so we were watching Wall Street fuck the little people of the world. But I can't help speculating about his fascination with the ruthless libertine, especially since the cast of Amour includes an operatic baritone who was once a notable Don Giovanni: William Shimell plays Huppert's husband, a philandering musician. "We met after I saw him as Don Alfonso in Cosí Fan Tutte," said Haneke. "The part in the film is small, I thought it would be amusing. Why not? And he will sing Alfonso when I direct Cosí in Madrid next year." That too is telling, since Alfonso in Mozart's opera is a manipulator, an unmoved mover who dares two young male friends to seduce each other's fiancees. Instead of questioning Haneke about his self-identification with this elderly cynic, I asked why Riva, early in her illness, shudders with disgust at what she calls Shimell's "British sense of humour". It's easy to imagine her son-in-law jollying her along, boosting her morale by teasing her. Would that be so very wrong? "I cannot say," replied Haneke with a disdainful sniff. "I am not British." His giggle this time was entirely humourless.

Foiled in my efforts to find out about his handling of people, I mentioned his lethal history with livestock. Trintignant traps a pigeon in Amour, and after appearing to smother it he chooses, in a beautiful rush of emotional release, to fondle and caress the bird. Haneke, I suspect, would have preferred to wring its neck, since like a method actor the pigeon ignored his direction. "Ah, that was awful! There were little seeds to guide it, but it went its own way through the apartment, always differently." It survived, however, unlike its fellow creatures in previous Haneke films. The family dog is the first victim in Funny Games, several horses have their throats slit in The Time of the Wolf, and Benny's Video begins with the butchery of a squealing pig – Haneke's perfectionism required the sacrifice of three porkers. Of course he had a theory ready to account for this carnage. "It is a hierarchy of power," he said. "Men on top, then women, then children, then animals at the lowest end. They are the ones that have to bear it."

But how much did these involuntary performers actually have to bear? I prodded Haneke about the aquarium in The Seventh Continent, overturned when the family wrecks its house as a prelude to suicide: the tropical fish flap and flounder in a sea of shattered glass. "We did our best to protect the fish," he said, which is not quite the same as the "no animals were harmed" declaration that the RSPCA requires. "To be honest, we did that scene many times. The whole studio was flooded, and the crew tried to grab the fish and put them in buckets of water every time I called 'cut'. By the end one or two were floating with their stomachs up. I believe they died of shock." This time he had the decency to not titter.

Blocking my efforts to implicate him in his films, he resumed his theorising. "You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art, we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich, when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war, literature was careful not to do the same, which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same." A film, according to this logic, exists only in the eye or mind of the beholder; Haneke, preserving his own moral superiority, takes no responsibility if someone sees Funny Games as a snuff movie or The Piano Teacher as pornography, and he remains blameless if we view Amour as a chilly experiment that vivisects its elderly actors.

Haneke is the most incisive analyst of the kind of evasion he practises in interviews: it amounts, in his judgment, to a national psychosis. The Viennese parents in Benny's Video cover up the evidence of the murder their son has committed at home, and the German pastor in The White Ribbon indignantly refuses to recognise the horrors – including the crucifixion of a pet bird – that abound in his household. Haneke is dealing, as he has often said, with Austria's suppressed guilt, its refusal to acknowledge its shamingly recent past. Born in 1942, he grew up with this collective denial, which has become second nature to him; he has no war crimes to live down, but he must sometimes be alarmed by the darker, more transgressive impulses of his imagination. I didn't ask him about this, because he had already given me his all-purpose obstructive answer: he has only a nodding acquaintance with the author, so the dubious motives I attribute to him must be my own.

His slipperiness left me feeling frustrated, and I heard the echo of his pesky giggle, an aural version of the Cheshire cat's smile, in the Paris street when I left. Then I remembered the impact Amour had on me – a tribute to the beatific grace of its actors and to their physical and moral courage, yet also to Haneke's unsparing quest for the truth about the way we live and die. A film director has the right to remain invisible; hauled out of hiding by the marketers, he is entitled to conceal or to profess ignorance of the urges that underlie his work. But it's easier to watch Haneke's films, harrowing as they are, than to meet the man who made them.

[wilder]

Michael Haneke: A tender look at life as it slowly slips away
via The Independent

The Austrian filmaker's award-winning film, Amour, which explores the suffering caused by old age, is a gruelling watch. We can relate to it because we've all seen a loved one in pain, he tells Stephen Applebaum




Michael Haneke has a sense of humour. You might not realise it watching, sometimes enduring, his tough- minded, often psychologically and emotionally bruising films, but the Austrian auteur can laugh at himself. Or rather, at his reputation for disturbing and uncompromising cinema. Take the last time I met him. As our discussion about his award-winning study of the roots of Nazism (and terrorism in general), The White Ribbon, wound down, he touched on his next project.

"It will be about the decomposition and the humiliation of the human body in old age," he said blithely. Perhaps noticing my jaw drop, he added laughing: "So a funny thing! Another jolly film!"

Haneke chuckles and smiles a lot during interviews. As a filmmaker, though, he doesn't really do "jolly" or "funny", not even when the movie itself is called Funny Games. (I defy anyone to find a single laugh in this harrowing tale of a bourgeois Austrian family terrorised by two sadistic youths.) It comes as no surprise, then, that the new French-language drama to which he alluded, Amour, and which earned the 70-year-old his second Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, puts more emphasis on exploring the impact of the degradations of time and illness than putting a spring in our step. If old age scares you, you'll find scant consolation here. The film is about love, but it isn't Love, Actually.

Dressed, as usual, entirely in black, Haneke reveals the catalyst for Amour. "It reflects a comparable situation in my family where someone I loved very much died a terrible death," he says. "[It is about] the question of how you look upon the suffering of a loved one and not be able to do anything about it. How do you cope with the pain of seeing their suffering?"

Asked what he was getting out of working such an obviously difficult personal experience into a movie, he tells me firmly that it's none of my business "why" he does a story. "As a private person, professionally I am invisible," he asserts, with a laugh that this time feels like a fist concealed inside a velvet glove.

To be fair this position is in keeping with Haneke's oft-repeated refusal to say anything that could direct viewers to think about his work in a particular way. "An artist is someone who should raise questions rather than give answers," he once told me. "I have no message." Often the kinds of questions he is asking are insoluble, anyway, "and anybody who claims they have a solution is either a liar or an idiot. When I go to the cinema, I don't want to be treated like an idiot." His aim, therefore, "is always to tell stories in such a way as to involve and question the spectator". Haneke wants to create a dialogue with his audience, not induce passivity. Films that do the latter are "boring", he sniffs. "You forget them immediately after you leave the screening room."

Amour certainly isn't a film you could forget in a hurry. Set almost entirely inside a spacious Paris apartment, based on the one Haneke grew up in Vienna, it opens with the discovery of an old woman's decomposing corpse laid out lovingly on a bed, surrounded by flowers, and then proceeds to chart the events that led to this point.

Confronting us with death's inevitability in the film's opening scene feels like a statement of intent, telling us there will be no sentimentality, no sweetening of the pill. And so it turns out. There is no hiding from reality as octogenarians Georges (Jean-Lous Trintignant, for whom the film was written) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) discover, arguably, the true meaning of love, after a stroke sends Anne into a protracted and irreversible decline. It is a painful journey in which the couple's feelings of anger, frustration, pain, guilt, entrapment and grief, among other things, are portrayed in almost microscopic detail. As Anne's condition worsens, she ceases to be herself – the person Georges knew effectively dying before the body does. This, says Haneke, is something that's "overwhelming" to watch.

"It's unbearable when someone changes around you. Just imagine that your life partner changes, then it is difficult to cope with. Or your mother. Or your father. They were strong and now they're like a baby – it's not so funny."

The couple, whom Haneke points out are not modelled on his parents, are former music teachers living in a comfortable middle-class milieu. This is Haneke's social class and, he believes, that of most of his audience. He could have made them financially less well off, of course. But then people might have missed the point that Amour is a film about the human condition.

"The audience might have reflected on 'Oh, if only their finances had been better', or 'If only their social situation had been better', then the situation wouldn't have been as painful. That's not the case. It's the same for everyone. No matter where you're from, or which background you're from, this situation is always going to be terrible."

Some commentators have called Amour the filmmaker's warmest, most tender and humane (as if his other films somehow lacked humanity) film yet, and questioned whether it marks a shift in Haneke and his work. The man himself laughs at the idea. "I think in most of my other films, too, there were heartwarming scenes. Even Funny Games. If you look at certain scenes involving the victims, the couple, there were heart-wrenching, very moving scenes, too."

If people are responding differently to Amour, it's because of the subject matter, he suggests, not because he is a different person. "The film is moving because its about something we can all identify with. It deals with a theme that has touched us all. None of us has been spared the pain of seeing a loved one suffer and go through this. That is what makes it, perhaps, more universal. That's at least my opinion."

The movie raises all sorts of questions about the meaning of love and what it might require from us, about the things that make life worth living and the point when merely existing is not enough, and much more besides. It is a gruelling, difficult watch, but then what else would you expect from the man who gave us films like Funny Games and The Piano Teacher, which shocked Cannes with female genital-mutilation years before Lars von Trier's (admittedly more graphic) Antichrist, or the taut and disturbing psychological thriller Hidden, in which a couple are terrorised, to nail-biting effect, by an unknown assailant?

Haneke takes us to uncomfortable places, and asks us to think about uncomfortable things. Amour makes it impossible not to think about one's own future. The possibility that we could also end up like Anne, immobile, bedridden and incapable of feeding or cleaning ourselves, or having to take the terrible decision that Georges is ultimately faced with, is hard to imagine. On the other hand, we could be lucky and go out like Haneke's grandmother-in-law.

"She was 95, she was sitting at a table surrounded by 20 friends, and at one point she said, 'I am tired,' and laid her head on the table and died. For me, that is the ideal death."

[wilder]

Screenplay

[wilder]

[samsong]

wilderesque, really curious to know your elaborated thoughts on the film, which apart from the acting I found to be thankless and mean.

[picolas]

can you elaborate on how this film is mean? and out of curiosity have you ever lost anyone gradually to mental deterioration? i found this pretty amazing.. the first haneke i could actually love, beyond admiring. its nearly unwavering naturalism is a kind of gift.

[samsong]

to answer the second question, no i haven't, but i felt like i had after this movie.  if there is something to regard about this film, it's the performances and the unflinching fixation on the end of a life, and the kind of gravitas it gives to that specific experience that i am more than certain is true to life.  what i don't appreciate and consider to be, in an overly reductive term, mean is the way haneke makes a harrowing experience worse, as if the film's sole purpose was to bum the audience out.  code unknown is the only film of his i love, which i found to be profoundly enlightening in the midst of all its discomfort, and it's one of the most radical narrative experiments i've seen in movies that i thought was incredibly successful.  everything else of his i've seen has struck me as being defiantly impenetrable and provocative for provocation's sake.

SPOILERS

starting the film the way that he does announces the film's intention as a bad feelings endurance test to me.  after that i was pretty wrapped up in the movie and found it to be pretty effective up until that second nurse got involved, wherein the mechanics of haneke's emotional manipulations become woefully apparent.  then there's the issue of way to trintignant puts his wife out of her misery.  the story he tells about his childhood i thought was incredibly poignant, and then he SMOTHERS her?!  what, short of the kind of prolonged torture in funny games could be worse?  not much.  i'm sure you can justify it however you like (impulsion, desperation, whatever other complex character motivation you want to give it) but the choice on haneke's part to have this character smother his wife in that moment, the way he does, seems to me a deliberate choice to layer pain on pain, and is the kind of hollow, forcibly ambiguous arthouse tactic that i don't have patience for.  not providing easy answers and oppressively forcing your audience to ask questions aren't the same thing to me.

[picolas]

i really disagree with the idea that this movie is just trying to make people feel bad. the characters themselves are able to squeeze every last bit of joy out of miserable situation, eg.

spoils

one of the most touching scenes for me was when they were sort of dancing as she tried to walk, half-paralyzed. there's a weird joy and humour in this moment that could easily have been incredibly trying/painful, and if haneke was trying merely to make people feel bad, he would've chosen to make the scene just that. i think the smothering, as brutal and awful as it is, goes back to his commitment to keep her out of caretaking facilities, and he hung on until it was either that or death. she made conscious efforts to show her distaste for her state of living.. she didn't want to eat or drink. and she didn't want to be forced to do it either. so a quick death was the most humane option.

i think this movie is essential viewing for anyone close to people on their way out, which is going to be most of us, eventually. it's a totally unsentimental story about the need to love and treasure each other for as long as we can. that may sound obvious, but it's really, really difficult to keep that in mind when you have trouble recognizing someone you've spent your life with.

[wilder]

Major Spoilers

I'm nothing of a critic, but I'll try to articulate why I found this movie so admirable and worthwhile.

The film took me to places I hadn't been before - it put me in a state of grieving for the living. I loved how elliptically and subtly information was communicated and the style in which it was done, how often Haneke allowed the audience to add 2 + 2: Georges' ultimately unseen suicide (harking back to the opening scene with the officers – "Did you open the window?"), the slow, devastating reveal of Anne's occupation as a former piano instructor, the elegant way he conveyed that Anne came out of the trance after her first stroke with just the sound of the running faucet being shut off after Georges had left the kitchen, which our attention was expertly diverted from as a setup for that. 

no i haven't, but i felt like i had after this movie.  if there is something to regard about this film, it's the performances and the unflinching fixation on the end of a life, and the kind of gravitas it gives to that specific experience that i am more than certain is true to life.

Yes! But what I find so wonderful about it is how much he humanizes the experience, how he conveys the extent to which they love each other even through these extremely trying circumstances.

what i don't appreciate and consider to be, in an overly reductive term, mean is the way haneke makes a harrowing experience worse, as if the film's sole purpose was to bum the audience out. [...]  ...then there's the issue of way to trintignant puts his wife out of her misery.  the story he tells about his childhood i thought was incredibly poignant, and then he SMOTHERS her?!  what, short of the kind of prolonged torture in funny games could be worse?  not much.  i'm sure you can justify it however you like (impulsion, desperation, whatever other complex character motivation you want to give it) but the choice on haneke's part to have this character smother his wife in that moment, the way he does, seems to me a deliberate choice to layer pain on pain, and is the kind of hollow, forcibly ambiguous arthouse tactic that i don't have patience for.  not providing easy answers and oppressively forcing your audience to ask questions aren't the same thing to me.

It takes Anne becoming an unrecognizable version of herself, barely herself, for Georges to recognize the selfishness of his actions – having Georges smother Anne isn't an attempt to make the audience feel bad, to test how much they can take, it's a turn in his character, an admission of his own selfishness and in a twisted way, giving Anne what she originally wanted – to die without losing every ounce of her dignity. One of the most revealing interactions in the film occurs at the breakfast table, before Anne's mind starts to go...

Anne
Aha...? Don't tell me you're going to ruin your image in your old age?

Georges
(grinning)

You bet I won't. But what is my image?

I love lines like this. It plants the idea of the character's fear of losing her dignity, but the one who eventually changes in the way described is directing the question at the other. And it poses a fundamental question about the human condition: Who am I? Is the "me" you know an "image". When Anne deteriorates mentally and physically, is that a perversion of her true essence, the woman Georges knows and loves, or was the woman Georges knew and loved merely a transient state of being, albeit the longest state, but this other thing Anne has become, this "monster" (which she accuses him of being sometimes during the same breakfast conversation) an equally valid state of humanity? When Georges smothers her, even though he's remaining loyal to the wishes of the Anne he knew, is there also just a revulsion to a form of humanity just as valid, but that everyone has difficulty admitting is part of the human condition? The storytelling techniques have the same effect as associative imagery, but they're invisible instead.

starting the film the way that he does announces the film's intention as a bad feelings endurance test to me. 

For me it was the opposite. Choosing to structure Amour the way he did struck me as Haneke doing the very antithesis of the thing he criticizes Spielberg for in using the shower scene in Schindler's List as an opportunity to manipulate the audience -- taking away that element of suspense as not to cheapen the present moment, to allow us to invest in the now and really concentrate on the emotional transactions between Anne and Georges without that question mark hovering in the background. Setting up the story in this way forces us to focus on how it happens and how they deal with it, because the ultimately less interesting question of what ends up happening is already answered.

There were moments where I felt Georges was annoyed with Anne for using her ill state as an excuse to be more demanding than necessary because she knew she could get away with it without criticism, and that Georges felt secretly guilty about feeling annoyed and needed to forgive her for everything and anything because he knew she wanted to die and was going on living out of love for him. Little behavioral insights like that, things difficult to admit to oneself, were abound. To my mind, many moments in Amour reached the heights of nuance achieved in Scenes from a Marriage.

I felt the pace and writing was nearly note-perfect. I believed everything said as a true fact of these characters' lives as if they had really lived. The only time I was caught off guard was when Anne blurted out that she didn't want to go on living any longer – but I believed the sentiment, just not the suddenness of that realization at that point in the story.

I can't think of anything else right now, maybe more later.

[samsong]

SPOILERS

you make a good point about the opening deflating any suspense about what ends up happening and stripping that moment of any shock value.  but if that was the case i still don't understand why it's smothering of all things that is the way he decides to do it.  smothering results in quick deaths in films (whether or not that has any bearing to life is beyond me, but my imagination tells me it takes longer than the 10 seconds or so it takes people to smother someone to death in movies) and it looks far from painless.  there is the idea that taking a life of another person, especially one you love, being an entirely counter-intuitive, difficult act to actually commit would result in something so crude and sudden, but this is a clearly premeditated act and they are a couple of means and intelligence, residing comfortably, even luxuriously in the modern world.  there are quieter, more peaceful, painless ways to euthanize a person instead of asphyxiation with a fucking pillow.  i don't think it's any less hard to watch, and substantially less brutal, but there it is in the movie.  i'm left wondering "why smothering?!" instead of contemplating the act and its significance.  as i'd mentioned before i was pretty much with the movie until that point, where it basically lost me entirely, and it's a moment that skews my perception of a lot of what preceded it.

i think there's value in confronting mortality, and there are portions of this film that i find commendable but in the end i don't know what to make of it and am simply left with the feeling that i had been forced to witness something i wasn't supposed to.  i don't feel any more compassionate or wiser for having seen it.  their performances struck me as being brave and true.  i simply can't say the same about the film on the whole.  it was an oversimplification to suggest that the sole purpose of the movie is to make an audience suffer, but to have gone through this film and to be as indifferent as i was put me in a rather dismissive mood.   i can say i wish i saw the film you guys did, because it sounds great.

can we discuss the pigeon?  because i can't for the life of me come up with anything that satisfactorily makes it necessary to the film.  also for a film that's so stoic in its portrayal of dying, i found anna's reappearance to be a bit regressive.

[wilder]

Hmm...I see what you're saying about the smothering, but I bought it when it happened and looking back on it now I'm guessing he chose to have Georges do it that way because it personalizes the act the most and makes the emotional pain that much more external...probably also a way of ending her by himself without leaving obvious signs that she didn't die in her sleep.

But yeah the pigeon bit is a bit dodgy I'll agree. It seemed to me Haneke was acting on the expectation of his reputation with those scenes which was way too self-conscious for my taste. Not sure if this is what other's got but from my pov it was always a question of whether or not Georges was going to be able to catch and harm the pigeon...and after finally catching it he holds and pets it because his wife's passing / deterioration has left him with such a void. Iono..definitely pretty dodgy. I liked the rest of the movie so much I chose to shrug off those scenes.

I think the main difference in our reactions might have to do with something you said in your earlier post:

not providing easy answers and oppressively forcing your audience to ask questions aren't the same thing to me.

Can you elaborate on that? The movie's forcing the audience to ask questions about this uncomfortable subject is a testament to its strength in my eyes, and a testament to the lucidity with which it approaches such difficult material. It's certainly one of the bravest movies I've ever seen, and I can only commend Haneke for being courageous enough to stare into the face of mortality without flinching as he did. The length to which he dedicated himself to looking at behavior and states of life we almost always turn away from did actually elevate the film for me and I thought took it to completely another plane. This isn't even violence or gore, it's a state of emotional crisis people are almost never together enough inside of (if experiencing it personally) to process with as perceptive a gaze as he was able to level on these characters. I was seriously nauseous for half the screening, but I do think it affected me in a way that inspired compassion and made me entertain questions worth thinking about.

I agree the film makes you feel a bit sick, it feels unhealthy in some ways. But for as natural as the scenes play I can't imagine any other reaction being appropriate or possible. I hope you'll see it again at some point.

[samsong]

for me it's a distinction between allowing an audience to face the challenge of a difficult subject (human deterioration and the capacity to love) and treating said subject in a difficult manner so as to provoke discourse that stems more from confusion than a desire for insight (making deliberate choices that break the illusion of the film, like having this old dying woman meet her end by having her husband kill her in a distinctly cinematic manner).  what's so frustrating is that so much of the film is so wonderfully hands off that things like the smothering, the pigeon scenes, anna's reappearance, the early dream sequence, or that georges has to go so far as to make it an even more headline worthy event by adding suicide to murder boggles my mind in terms of how intrusive they are.  it's true that the effective bits are truly wrenching but i'm left with the response of, "so what?"  where others, most even, have seemingly found enlightenment, i've found frustration and disappointment.

[wilder]

I'm going to think about your post.