By Emily Rosen
Every time I flip January off my calendar, I get the urge to write about LOVE.
I sit down at my computer and realize that actually, in one way or another, I’ve “done” Valentine’s Day dozens of times. Is there anything, I ask myself, that I can say about love in all its forms that I haven’t said before – any angle that I haven’t covered?
So I throw my hands up in the air, get out of my chair and go to the movies. And what better to see under the circumstances than “Amour?”
I tell you folks that IMO (in my opinion) this is the most extraordinary piece of artwork I’ve experienced in longer than I can remember. Admittedly, the subject is not for everyone, but to get beyond the content and into the production, direction, acting and overall palette is to witness something rare. It is not giving anything away to state that the film is about the relationship of an old married couple and what happens when one of them becomes helpless. It is in French, by the way, with English captions. If it were merely that, I would not blame anyone for skipping the rest of this column with a capricious “Not For Me,” despite the fact that in some sense, each of us can relate to such a situation, be it personal, possible, or actual with some close family or friends.
What makes this film extraordinary is the way it treats ordinariness, the way it shines as a brilliant display of all that is good in life and is accepting of that which is not good and cannot be changed. There are several tiny bits of what Hollywood would call “shtick,” small examples of life routines, the boring stuff that we barely even notice – washing dishes, drinking coffee, having a most mundane conversation about nothing important, that suction the viewer into the world of the screen in a magical way that defies analysis.
A pigeon flies into an open window and Georges, the
husband finds a way to help it fly back out of the window – until the time, days later, when it flies back into the house. And true to its title, this film is a depiction of what love – without the concomitant joys and compensations of sex – is really all about.
This is no Pollyanna approach to the hardships that Georges experiences in his care for his longtime wife, Anne. Nor does it whitewash the resentments, anguish and inner turmoil that erupt, even as he is able to suppress them. His loving care is merely a reflection of what comes naturally to him, and he doesn’t even entertain the possibility of any kind of alternate response.
Aside from the slim but riveting storyline, which basically depicts Anne’s slow and agonizing descent toward the inevitable, the film glows with its subtle exploration of a variety of feelings in addition to “love” – an incandescent quality that is rare in cinema. Despair, frustration, nostalgia, loss, pride, defeat, doubt, empathy, acceptance – all are portrayed from the gut and depth of two French stars whose performances “blow you away.”
I was once asked for my definition of “love” and quickly changed the subject because I couldn’t come up with the exact response I wanted. This movie says it all.
