Woody Allen once made a comedy called Love and Death. Michael Haneke has made a film called Love
that is about death, and is superficially a tragedy, but only
superficially. Beginning with the end, the body of a woman alone in a
luxurious
Paris apartment, Haneke then takes us through the stages of her decline following a stroke.
The woman is played by Emmanuel Riva, the 85-year-old whose earliest starring role was in the similarly titled Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), her husband by the slightly younger Jean-Louis
Trintignant, of ...And God Created Woman, The Conformist, and other European classics. Isabelle Huppert, who plays the couple’s daughter in a few scenes, has starred in two Haneke films, Time of the Wolf and The Piano Teacher. (Here, Riva’s character was once a piano teacher.) We never see these characters at a younger age, but
French viewers may feel that they have known them well via earlier roles.
Haneke has strongly resisted the conventions of Hollywood (though
he remade his own film Funny Games in English) and mainstream cinema, such as tidy endings. In doing so he has made movies that can seem chilly and detached. Films like Funny Games, The Piano Teacher,
and The White Ribbon take a nearly clinical look into dark aspects of human
behavior. I’m not sure whether he’s doing anything different here. It
may be that simply placing his camera in front of these two characters, one
witnessing her own decline, the other transitioning
from husband to caretaker, is responsible for the deep empathy we feel
for both. His approach is at once minimalist and rich in detail. The
camera lingers, sometimes to the point where the viewer may become
impatient, but allows us to see the evidence of this couple’s life together, including
their well-appointed residence, full of books, art, and old furniture.
The tragedy embodied in the movie is that with all the ways
modernity has made life easier, it has done little to improve the
experiences of death and loss. The way in which it is not a tragedy, is hopeful
even, is in its depiction of the tenderness shown
by the husband. He does not speak the film’s title. No protestations of
ardor, no dramatic medical interventions, no grand gestures (well, not more than one),
as in a Nicholas Sparks novel, no mad dashes to the airport attest to
his feelings. All that does is his willingness to do for his wife, day after day, what she cannot do and would want done. (In contrast is his daughter, who cannot see the situation through the eyes of her parents.) You don’t expect to see that
in one of Haneke’s movies, and that makes it all the more moving.
viewed 1/27/13 4:00 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 1/18/13
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