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#Post#: 96--------------------------------------------------
AMOUR (2012)
By: agate Date: January 5, 2014, 1:18 am
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WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
This story is set almost entirely within the confines of the
apartment inhabited by an aging couple who have been dedicated
to teaching music all their lives. Seeing the two of them
interacting as Anne’s health fails, just the two of them, during
so much of the movie puts the focus on what it must be like to
be too paralyzed to take care of yourself–or to be a loving
companion standing helplessly by as a partner’s condition
worsens.
Anne, the wife, has had unsuccessful carotid artery surgery and
has been left paralyzed on one side. It is understood that her
situation will only deteriorate.
I have no problem with a movie’s showing this grim situation
close up and in detail.
It’s not an in-your-face “Here’s paralysis! Here’s what living
with someone paralyzed is like!” story, though. It’s a movie
about the husband Georges’s growing awareness that Anne’s life
is pretty much gone and that he himself may not be up to the
demanding job of caring for her. We can see how much he loves
her and cares for her–and she for him. They have had a good and
happy life together.
And she has given him her tacit permission by stating that she
doesn’t want to go on living like this.
But the movie opens with an event that we assume all along will
be the final outcome–the view of Anne’s dead body–and yet it
tacks on an ending-to-the-ending by suggesting that the whole
story may have been (probably was?) all in Georges’s
imagination. Anne is alive and well and washing dishes in the
kitchen.
Or are we to think that having smothered Anne with her pillow
has completely unhinged Georges so that at the end–before he
turns on the gas or whatever he does to end his own life–he is
hallucinating with visions of the days when life was going along
in its usual way? I don’t think so. There has been no evidence
of Georges’s failing mental faculties.
The movie begins by giving us a couple of important unanswered
questions, and we expect to get the answers by the end. One is
how she actually died–naturally? By her own hand? With Georges’s
assistance?
These turn out to be irrelevant questions entirely because–hey,
it was all just a dream. This seems to me a cheat, a cop-out, a
refusal on the movie-makers’ part to give us the story.
There is another question, though, that comes up as the story
unfolds, and that is how Georges assists her death. Being such a
kind, loving man, he would have chosen some painless, quiet way
of helping her to die, wouldn’t he? An overdose of something,
perhaps?
Instead we see him smothering her with her pillow. Perhaps it
was the one way he could think of that wouldn’t be detected as
murder. In any event, her death did involve some struggle and
probable pain on her part.
Looked at in another light, though, maybe the ending isn’t such
a cop-out. Maybe we’re being told that this is how George is
mapping things out in case this situation arises–his wife’s
near-total incapacity and deteriorating condition. This is what
he would do IF… and he would make sure that somewhere in their
conversations she would give her assent to euthanasia by stating
that she doesn’t want to live like that.
There is the matter of the several paintings that appear, each
occupying the full screen, shown just before Georges smothers
Anne, and just after he’s said, “Forgive me.” The paintings are
Romantic landscapes, just as the music the couple seem to have
been fond of–Schubert, for instance–is Romantic, and one
commentator on this movie has said that the paintings are
unremarkable ones that are among those on the couple’s apartment
walls. I haven’t tried to find the paintings in the scenes of
the apartment though it might be possible to do so by looking at
each scene very carefully.
The unsettled question is why they are shown at this point in
the movie, which has no other views of paintings, no mention of
paintings, in fact no views of nature anywhere.
Maybe that is the point. Georges must realize at about the time
when he slaps Anne that their situation is falling apart
hopelessly. Maybe the paintings are a way of showing us the vast
world out there that he and Anne have been increasingly shut off
from. Or maybe they are simply showing us yet another part of
the rich world these two have created through the years–their
music, their photos, the paintings on their walls, their
personalities so quiet, modest and trusting that they can’t
imagine why anyone would want to break into their apartment.
When I first saw this movie I assumed that the corpse glimpsed
in the first scenes is Georges’s body but reviewing it I see
that it isn’t. It is Anne, and he has taken a dark dress out of
the closet to clothe her in it, and carefully snipped the
blossoms off the flowers in a bouquet a visitor has brought to
surround her head.
In death, though, she looks somewhat like Georges, and the
question has to arise: Just where IS Georges? When the Fire
Department/Police come in, they get no answer when they ask if
anybody is home. They begin stripping tape from doors, tape we
find out later Georges has applied. Will they find him dead in
the spare room? Or did he walk away from the apartment, perhaps
to his death somewhere else? Or does he live on alone? We never
know.
–Which is good. We’re at least aware that he has that clear
option–of following his wife in death through suicide. Somebody
has stated that this movie has nothing to do with aging–that it
could just as easily have been made about a younger couple.
When I think about Georges and how he isn’t there, how he might
have decided to kill himself as well, I don’t think it would
have been the same movie at all if it had been made about a
younger couple. The viewers wouldn’t assume that Georges might
have killed himself. It would have been highly inappropriate and
jarring in the extreme. But we have seen the Georges of this
movie already starting to fail, finding it difficult to get up
from bed, difficult to take care of Anne. It is sad but quite
possible that the police will find Georges’s body in that
apartment as well.
–Whatever else it is, the movie is a profoundly touching closeup
of a couple’s love for each other.
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