Amour’s
protagonist is not death
(nor any of its humans, impeccable acting though they perform), but silence.
Music (always solo piano, either live or on CD) is played on
five occasions: by the
student-cum-performer at his Parisian concert, by him again in Anne’s and
Georges’ apartment, by Georges briefly, and with CD recordings by the student
and possibly Anne. The final three
renderings are brief, interrupted; silence
is chosen over the music. Opening and
closing credits are done in silence—the
silence of the
opening broken by crashing doors to the reek of death, the silence
of the closing preceded by Anne’s ghost speaking the prosaic, Aren’t you taking a coat?
The dialogue is almost mythic in its everyday sparseness,
much of the film’s meaning conveyed by gesture, glances, aversions, absence. There are no answers to or attempts to answer
the primary questions of love, family, meaning, suffering, death. They
exist on their own; silence
speaks their murky unspeakable truths.
The melancholic and common analogy between the dependent
infant—diapered, babbling—waxing into life, and the dependent geriatric—diapered,
babbling—waning from life, is secondary to the more deeply melancholic
comparisons established. While no children
are present in the film, Amour highlights
life’s arc through youth (Alexandre, the musician, busily and importantly
successful; the second nurse, emotionally incompetent in her technical
competence) and middle age (Eva, Anne’s and Georges’ daughter, obsessed with
money, security, fidelity; the concierge and her husband, respectfully
concerned). A kind of helplessness is
everywhere—youth’s inability to comprehend aging; middle age’s inability to
construct sufficient defences to dam the lurking terror of decline; the
inability of respectable concern, medicine, hired-help to do much of anything—underpinned
by the nearly mute and choreographed dance of Georges and Anne.
An aspect of their dance is the ironies and parodies of a once-vital
eros, altered through daily scrimmage and subtextual negotiation into a
familiar companionship, not unpleasant, the good-enough marriage. This parody begins with the sexual
suggestiveness and rejection upon the couple’s return from the concert (he: shall we have a drink? she: i’m
tired. he: i fancy another drink. she: do
as you please [continues to talk]. he:
did i tell you that i thought you looked
very pretty tonight. she: what’s
gotten into you? he smiles with
familiarity, resignation, goes into the kitchen. she: the
semiquavers in the presto were incredible. what subtlety!)
The wry smile turns to a cringe when they’re in the bathroom
together and he pulls up her panties; later, when she touches his hand and the
graze almost offends him in pretending to close a gap that has almost opened to
infinity.
Then ,when Anne says, still with moments of lucidity, when
looking through the photographs of her life, Life is beautiful, we can’t help but agree and object. This ambivalence—life’s ambivalence—threads
its way through the film.
One of its threads is the relationship between society’s chitchattiness
and nothingness, highlighted almost to the point of laughter (were it not for
its familiar pathos) in Anne’s and Georges’ domestic rituals and negotiations
(the salt cellar exchange in the kitchen, the newspaper reading and
interruptions in the parlour), spiralling outward toward the mute archaeologies
of marriage and family, the emotional resonance of space (even we come to identify
with the rooms, finally being shown the spare room at the end, when Georges is
alone).
Language’s ambivalence is centrally shown during the
comic-horrific exchange between Anne and Eva, as the daughter’s seemingly
normal but obviously absurd concerns with money contrast with the mother’s
fragmented response—seemingly absurd, but pointing to truth (not dissimilar to
Lucky’s central speech in Godot).
(While so little of the film is shot in society—most of it
intimate, private—the only public social shot, in the opening at the concert,
begins with a view of the audience from stage [the detachment of death, silence], also
nodding to The Crowd and strangely
mirroring the opening of another very different ’12 film—Holy Motors.)
Perhaps less apparent is the ambivalence between nature and
the city: the faucet, the rain, as
backdrops to moments of decline; the pigeon (innocent because without moral
knowledge, speechless, rather awkward and stupid) haphazardly intruding into
the apartment, captured by Georges in a kind of danse macabre (and we are
tense, are we not? will he catch it? kill it? free it? the moment seems
pivotal), contrasted with the weight of our knowledge. Amour
is stretched between the discontents of civilization and their dark haphazard
unknowing roots (Paris is the perfect environment for this, though we hardly
glimpse it, stuck as we are in a cosmic domesticity), and we along with it, elastics
as we are, testing our substance on the finger of time, about to snap on the
timeless edges of earth.
Sometimes seemingly at the center but orbiting around it is death—holy of holies, the
door behind the door, Anne flowered and dried, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream (or is it Nightmare?—we can’t say).
Partially revealed (and isn’t everything in the film partially revealed?) is the West’s
sophisticated but sterile treatment of death—its
clinicization and denial. Anne knows
when she should die and says so to Georges.
She does not have the will to insist; he does not have the will to
comply; both operate within societal confines that they have purchased and so
limit their vision and action. Near the
end, as his frustration mounts, as he breaks his bond and threatens her with
hospitalization (he: they can force-feed
you there), an evident contrast between the lack of dignity inherent in our
culture of prolonging life (of quantitative willful life over qualitative contextual
life) and the dignity embedded in the elder monk’s self-immolation in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring.
Georges’ precise recounting of the standard absurdity,
stupidity, and brutality in the funeral he attends amplifies modern society’s awkward,
technological, schizophrenic and foundationally inhumane and immature relationship
with death.
Even at Anne’s end, her body rejects its rejection. Only Georges is calm; Georges, with his three
dreams (of his own death,
of Anne playing the piano, of her in death
bringing him through a door—to death?
to life for a time?).
Along with life, death,
love, family, society, technology, and language, art doesn’t escape the
ambivalent thread—the music that surrounds and bolsters the couple’s life together
collapses into silence,
redeeming nothing.
Amour speaks the
darkness society avoids. It speaks it primarily
in silence, which binds
the film and us together, like a ghost, like gravity, like worms and bees.
Here is a more comprehensive and philosophical take on the
film—
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