“Amour”

 

Directed by Michael Haneke

With Jean Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Rivas and Isabelle Huppert

 

“Amour,” directed by Michael Henecke, is not an easy film to watch. It graphically deals with mortality: the indignities and decline of aging. But this unsettling film will affect you emotionally long after you have left the theater. “Amour” has won the Palme d’Or for best picture and at least a dozen more awards, including the Golden Globes.

Anne (Emanuelle Riva) and Georges (Jean Louis Trintignant) are a cultivated octogenarian couple who live in a fine Paris apartment. When the film opens, they are enjoying a concert. They go home, chatting amicably. At breakfast the next morning Anne goes blank for a few minutes. 

Georges doesn’t know what to do, but she soon regains consciousness. They see a doctor. Apparently she suffered a stroke. She then has surgery that leaves her right side paralyzed.

She returns to the apartment in a wheelchair and forcefully demands that George promise he will never ever take her to a hospital again. “Amour” examines the bonds of love between the couple as Anne begins her downward slide.

Georges becomes her caretaker, lovingly helping her to her wheelchair, cooking and cutting her food for her. He is determined to keep his promise to her. Their daughter, Eva ( Isabelle Huppert), a self-absorbed woman, insists he put her in  a “home.” He won’t hear of it. He has no time for his daughter. He is alone in his grief and can only watch as Anne descends to helplessness.

Soon Anne goes from a manual wheelchair to an electric one. Initially there is physical therapy, then nurses, sponge baths, bed sores, and finally diapers. Anne cannot move or speak. She is confined to her bed, undergoing the indecencies that accompany it.

Nearly all of “Amour” is filmed inside the apartment. Mr. Haneke wants us to feel how totally confined Anne and Georges are. The camera lingers on them as they eat, sleep, and bathe. He wants us to feel how onerous everything is to Anne.

Emmanuelle Riva is magnificent as she shows Anne’s initial shame at being helpless to how she struggles to emit sounds to communicate at the very end. She is transformed from an elegant woman to an angry invalid. It is truly remarkable how Ms. Riva captures this decline. 

Jean Louis Trintignant, who is a French film icon, quietly shows Georges’ concern, his frustrations, his bewilderment. He dutifully responds to Anne’s each and every need. There is never a false note in his towering performance.

Director Haneke does not include the background music that might tell the audience how it should feel. The filming is restrained and at times “Amour” feels like a documentary. It makes the viewer regard his or her own humanity. It can be agonizing to watch, but it is a realistic look at what may lie ahead. Things happen to secure people like Georges and Anne and everything changes.

Is it better to die young and quickly or to live a long life then slowly lose your abilities one by one? “Amour” is potent filmmaking about the hardships and often horrors of aging, something usually not addressed in the cinema. This honest and totally unflinching film will make you think.

“Quartet”

 

Directed by Dustin Hoffman

With Maggie Smith, Pauline Collins, Tom Courtenay, Billy Connelly, and Michael Gambon.

 

“Quartet” may deal with the struggles of aging, but it actually turns out to be a celebration of life. This touching and fun film looks at a group of elderly musicians who live in the elegant, but slightly decaying Beecham House situated in the pastoral English countryside. Dustin Hoffman makes his directorial debut with this film, which shows it is never to late to begin a new chapter in life…. for him at age 75 or for his characters.

The storyline is simple. The residents of Beecham House are trying to put a show together, a fund raiser to save their beloved residence, which has fallen on hard times. They are to put on a concert to honor the birthday of Giuseppe Verdi.

Wilfred Bond (Billy Connelly) is an outspoken wit, a flirt, a man who never fails to inject sexual innuendo at any opportunity. Reference is made to a stroke he has suffered. Reginald (Tom Courtenay, his old friend) is a reserved and proper gentleman. The ever-kind and energetic Cecily Robeson (Pauline Collins) loves life, but is beginning to suffer dementia. All three were famed opera singers, but those days are over long ago.

The Beecham house residents are all atwitter because a new resident is arriving. Jean Horton (Maggie Smith), a diva extraordinaire, is surely the most renowned of all of them. A feisty woman of huge ego and an aura of superiority, she refuses to take part in the planned gala performance. Her voice isn’t what it used to be and she has a bad hip. She and the courtly Reginald were once married until she was unfaithful to him. He has never forgiven her. This is the main conflict of “Quartet.” He refuses to acknowledge her and she snubs him.

“Quartet” examines life for the retired Beecham residents years after the applause has ended. The film deals with the unhappy challenges of aging. It seems as if every one of them has an ailment to overcome. Dustin Hoffman makes it all work. Far from being depressing, “Quartet” is fresh and vital. Most characters in the film are, in reality, one-time musicians or singers. They do a terrific job.

Like the “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” “Quartet” is a film that includes senior actors at the top of their game. It is a satisfying and sweet fairytale for seniors. However, younger viewers will also relate to it: They have aging parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles. And the show must go on for all of us. I suppose some viewers may find “Quartet” predictable and the ending too Hollywood. Who cares? I didn’t.