Haneke’s movies haven’t been made with the intention to delight or even

amuse the audience. They are mostly bitter concise interpretations of

human suffering, made with the sole purpose to plant a seed in the mind of the

audience and to raise an idea which may serve as the starting point of a long

route. From this angle, watching a film by Haneke should be accompanied by

a required willingness to experience pain and philosophical and moral

seriousness. This is especially true about his Amour: A cold slow film featuring

aged and frail characters that can barely walk within a narrow limited space

and rusty setting, surrounded by a sorrowful aura of senility, sickness and

reaching the end. However, after hearing the title of the movie and then

looking at its grey poster, you may hope to witness a mythical, even though

despairing, love which unlike Haneke’s other films, may not be totally imbued

with depression..

Amour enjoys an existential theme which, at its core regards humans as a

source of free will and creative authority, notwithstanding the limitations arising

from their physical frame and natural temper. According to this

worldview, humans shape and make themselves by their own decisions and

experiences and by the way, they are responsible for their choices, obliged to build

their own destiny based on their own criteria (and not the established general

patterns). Like any other human being, Georges and Anne have been

condemned to live each of their moments choosing between available options

and now in a decisive (final?!) turn of their being, they have to yield to a

critical (unavoidable?) decision. According to Haneke’s Existentialist way of

thinking in Amour, Determinism is basically impossible. Humanity can’t help

being free (and this is not caused by humanity’s impotence but the

impossibility of the matter). In certain situations, the range or diversity of the

options may be reduced and humanity’s freedom may be submitted to further

bonds but after all, human beings have free will. In a frightening but natural

and even ordinary moment, Georges and Anne are forced to make a decision.

And instead of resorting to a hospital or a sanitarium, they decide upon the

serenity of a neat liberating death beside each other. Although it is Anne who

is facing death, Georges has a share in it as well. Their lives, emotions, habits

and rather their “being” is merged into each other in a way which makes it

barely possible to put a finger on one of them as the decision maker. Anne freely

chooses death as some kind of deliverance to put the full stop on her

misfortune. She doesn’t want to live anymore. She doesn’t want to surrender

to the anguish and pain of her last moments and she wants to spare Georges

this pain as well.

Georges has an equal share in the final decision. He reviews the

memories of the past (which unlike many similar stories are not from a distant

past); He remembers a beautiful and healthy Anne playing piano, but in the

meantime, he is aware that every moment brings them closer to the end.

Amour inevitably recalls that peerless eternal soliloquy “To be, or not to be”.

Hamlet had to go through a philosophical/moral ordeal and his affliction

shaped Shakespeare’s drama, but Haneke’s characters don’t follow a

philosophical or moral purpose in their decisions. They don’t “create” death as

an inevitable truth and an existing conception. They just conjure it and push

forward its time. Here, unlike a lot of great dramas and tragedies of the

classical literature, it is not pretended as if a choice between life and death is

being made and instead, Georges and Anne regard death as a natural ending.

Love’s drama is born out of the conflict between pain and relief. The elderly

couple’s choice is relief. They apply to death as a means to reach relief and

to put an end to the misery and contempt and to avoid further distress. But

does Geroges really stand in the same place as Anne? Does dedicating a

releasing death to his wife lead him to something but pain?

The conditions of the two protagonists of Amour in the last chapter of

the story strongly reminds us of the concept of Yin and Yang in the philosophy

of Taoism and the presence of two opposing but complementary principles

within all the beings and phenomena. In a way, Anne and Georges are Yin and

Yang: One of them relieves pain and the other provides relief from pain

reaches. One can observe some hints at Buddhist thought in Amour, among

Haneke’s non-religious, devoid of Metaphysics attitude towards the

definition of the concept of death and the aforementioned existential aspects of

this attitude.

One of the fundamental, well-known principles of Existential philosophy is

that to decide and to know oneself, humans need to go through decisive

turning points or critical particular situations which have been subtly classified

into four estates and forms: the near-death experiences, frustration,

turbulence and guilt. However, there is also a fifth estate which from time to

time is placed next to the other four: love. In each of his films Haneke passes

through these four situations and each of these notions and feelings is

somehow involved in giving form to the fatalistic facets of the story and in

determining the destiny of the characters. Indeed the plot’s climax is a result

of the worsening of Anne’s conditions and her getting closer to death. Then

despair and anxiety which play a crucial role in the development of events of

the story, gradually become sensible in the manner of Georges and Anne and

their daughter. And finally, Georges and Anne’s decision leads to feelings of

guilt. And Georges shall carry the burden, while Anne has finally found

redemption. And about the fifth notion, it is too obvious to require explanation.

Amour owns the capacity to easily lead the audience to nihilism and

towards a feeling of futility about everything he or she has been watching:

George’s and Anne’s life together comes to an end, Anne is dead, George is left

behind with a load of unpleasant feelings and death is the end of everything. A

life lovingly built by two people is definitely over, leaving only memories and

daydreams. Hereby, Haneke shows us that every love, fulfilled or not, will end

with death, even if we try to keep it alive. The portrayal of Anne’s death partly

recalls the act of releasing a hopelessly sick or injured animal by killing it. After

all, it is death that embitters anything and reduces everything to nothing.

Without Anne, Georges is nothing, impartial. That is why he leaves house after

releasing Anne by killing her. From this stance, Haneke could have been

influenced by Kafka’s stories and thoughts. He has combined Existentialism

with Nihilism, although without a trace of Kafka’s absurdist motifs on love.

In addition to the disagreeable impression left by Amour in the mind of

the audience which is due to the subject matter and the claustrophobic

atmosphere of the film, its slow pace and lingering halts on people, objects and

the milieu of the house could be among the factors that make Amour

unwatchable for some people. Deeds like making love and killing a human

being have been pictured with utmost simplicity and seriousness by Haneke

and this is exactly what makes the film menacing and devastating. Haneke

doesn’t manipulate reality and instead of amusing and delighting his audience,

he insists on making them suffer and think. Of course those viewers who are

familiar with this filmmaker and his extraordinary approach, prepare

themselves in advance for watching a distressful masterpiece, ruthlessly

presenting the acrid bare reality. However, the difference between the

shattering impression of Amour and the unsettling effect of Haneke’s previous

films is as much as the difference between The White Ribbon and the

“controlled” violence of Amour. A difference of the same kind we may find

between a silent murderer with ordinary looks and manners and an angry

raging killer with a gun in his hands. There’s no need to say that getting face

to face with which one of these two murderers could be more frightening and

disturbing.

The slow sluggish pacing of the film is reasonably in perfect agreement

with the atmosphere and characters. Georges and Anne are an elderly couple

with a limited quiet life whose every moment is spent in a house which is in

fact their individual world and area. In accordance with this, the atmosphere of

the film is also attuned to this house and the bland empty lives of its

inhabitants. In coordination with Georges’ limping and shuffling around the

house, the film also breathlessly drags itself forward and like its protagonists

pause from time to time to be drowned in a boring silence. But these quiet

interludes have been included deliberately and each moment of them is in total

control of the director. As the film moves forward, this rhythm becomes

increasingly faster (and not faster) and comparing the different parts of the film

demonstrates Haneke’s meticulous timing and his deliberate detailed work on

each of the shots and the consistent whole. A precision which has been equally

applied to the arrangement of the house’s furniture and complements the

characters’ development. Dariush Khonji’s camerawork, characterized by the

slow movements of the camera shooting from the best angles is surely one of

the most effective elements of the film which manages to entice the viewer to

keep on watching a story as slow and sad as this which also takes place in a

single location.