Amour

Director: Michael Haneke

2013

11 July 2025

See

George (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are a Parisian couple and former music teachers in their eighties. Their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) is a musician and lives in London with her family and tours Europe, but checks in on them. Despite their independence and cultivation age and the threat of indignity catches up with the pair. 

Think

I love Isabelle Huppert in everything she does, Elle, Call My Agent. I’ve not seen Emmanuelle Riva before, but want to watch Hiroshima Mon Amour now, but it was Jean-Louis Trintignant’s performance that did it for me. He was so compelling in Three Colours Red, and now, an old man, he has lost none of his performative prowess, it’s even enhanced in this role. He continues to have cordial interactions with neighbours and manages the household and nursing staff. One such dismissal demonstrates how he retains their composure and standards. His mind is as sharp as ever even if his movements are less sure. And yet, show them one more time, like Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea, is this Trintignant last great performance? He did live for another nine years. It was Riva who was nominated for an Oscar for her acting, and she died four years after this film but played the end of life so convincingly it felt real, like the end must be nigh. That’s incredible acting. George verbally spars with Eva when she wants Anne to be hospitalised, but he reasons that hospice care is what he can provide at home and promised his wife that he wouldn’t. He takes on the responsibility for her palliative care with the help of nurses, but he himself is aged and his capabilities diminished, as if anyone is capable of that kind of all consuming care for a prolonged period. 

Feel

The scene with Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud) Anne’s former student was probably my favourite, that they’d seen his performance, he visited them unannounced, saw her condition after a stroke, asked what happened and Anne didn’t want to get into it. She requests he play a formative piece on the piano and he does. Then sends his latest DC with a heartfelt note, but she can’t stand his pity and asks George to turn it off.

George's nightmare shows Haneke to be a master. I didn’t know it was a dream that someone was knocking and going out into the corridor, until he turns the corner and it’s flooded and dark. And then that hand covering his mouth and he wakes up screaming. Or the symbolism of the pigeon keeping getting in to the apartment, and a restored Anne asking George if he’s ready to leave. It was a prosaic and profound realisation of the abstraction of it being his time too. Amour has a beautiful book end of the authorities busting down the door at the beginning and Eva letting herself in to the now lifeless apartment at the end.