Review: "Amour"

Please take note of the photo I chose to accompany this film review. The best available images I could find showed the same moment from "Amour" from different angles, with Jean-Louis Trintignant caressing the face of Emmanuelle Riva. The most popular image showed the face of Riva, who received an Oscar nomination for her performance, from over Trintignan's shoulder.

I specifically opted for the reverse angle, where we see Trintignan's face and not Riva's, to demonstrate what I think is a fallacy about the tremendous reception given to "Amour." To wit: Trintignant is the star, not Riva. And it is his performance critics and groups like the Academy Awards should be spotlighting, not hers.

I have not been shy about suggesting that I believe Riva and Quvenzhané Wallis from "Beasts of the Southern Wild" were nominated simply so the Academy could have a talking point about "the youngest and the oldest Best Actress nominees ever." Wallis did not deserve a nomination because hers was the performance of a talented 6-year-old, based on behavior, not craftsmanship.

For Riva, the answer is even simpler: hers is not even a leading performance, it is a supporting one.

As Anne Laurent, an elderly French woman slowly dissolving into dementia, Riva essentially acts for 25 minutes, and then slides into the figurative background. She is nearly mute and motionless for the last half of the movie, while the entire story is seen through the eyes of her husband Georges (Trintignant).

Look at the film, written and directed by Michael Haneke, from the perspective of grammar: Anne is the object of the narrative, while Georges is the subject. He acts upon her, while she is largely acted upon.

If one were to come up with a one-sentence summary of "Amour," it would not be, "A French woman succumbs to dementia and is cared for by her husband." It would be, "An elderly French man struggles to cope with the emotional and spiritual burden of caring for his ailing wife."

I say this not in an attempt to diminish the work by Riva, which is indeed quite good, but to simply place it in its proper perspective. The movie belongs to Trintignan, first and last.

Not surprisingly, I had a similar reaction to a Canadian movie with a similar theme from a few years ago, "Away From Her." In a bit of repeated history, that film also saw the female lead nominated for an Oscar while the male lead was ignored. I have persistently, if unsuccessfully, lobbied that that film's title should be corrected to "Away From Him."

"Amour" is a lovely piece of filmmaking, with all-around terrific acting. Isabelle Huppert also has a small role as their daughter Eva, who is middle-aged and busy, and treats her mother's illness as a tremendous inconvenience, without ever being nasty about it.

But is it deserving of all its many accolades, including winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes and an unexpected raft of Oscar nominations? I would say not.

"Amour" is wonderfully made but terribly unoriginal. We have seen variations of this story so many times before, it's hard not to think about those other, superior films while watching it. In my cattier moments, I have taken to referring to the film as "My Old, Paralyzed Left Foot" and "Million Franc Baby." ("Away From Him, With Subtitles" is a new one that comes to mind.)

I will not deny that "Amour" is a worthwhile cinematic experience, and the often negative tone of this review may mislead you into thinking I am not recommending it. I am.

But for all the myriad honors and awards that have been bestowed on "Amour," I truly believe it is most deserving of one more: Most Overrated Film of the Year.

3 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Hiroshima mon amour" (1959)

"Hiroshima mon amour" helped kick off the French New Wave in 1959. It's interesting that filmmaker Alain Resnais has often been identified as part of that movement, when he'd already been making movies for more than a decade before that while Truffaut, Goddard and the gang were off pretending to be film critics.

(I say "pretend" because they've more or less acknowledged that they were just trying to get attention to launch their own filmmaking careers.)

It's the story -- perhaps "story" is not the right word, Resnais often being less concerned with coherent narrative than evocative imagery and ideas -- of two people: A Frenchwoman named Elle (though we never hear her name) played by Emmanuelle Riva and a Japanese architect named Liu (Eiji Okada). As the film opens they have just had a one-night stand ... or so she thinks. He feels a powerful pull toward her, which she at first disavows but eventually comes to acknowledge.

Alas, she's an actress shooting an anti-war movie in Hiroshima, and the next day she is scheduled to fly back to Paris. They spend the next 36 hours or so in a running conversion about love, death, the bombing of that city, and forgetfulness.

I can't say as I really enjoyed myself watching "Hiroshima mon amour" -- as with Resnais' more recent work, I find his style deliberately off-putting; the thought of entertaining an audience seems repugnant to him -- but I respect the film for its audacious storytelling. Marguerite Duras earned an Oscar nomination for her screenplay.

One of the things Resnais does that is truly groundbreaking is the many mini-flashbacks he inserts into a scene, so you can visualize what a character is talking or thinking about. Like when Elle discusses her period of madness while a young girl living in Nevers, the view slips from the streets of Hiroshima where she's walking to the stony maze of that French town. It sounds so simple, and has since come to become a staple of the language of cinema. But in 1959, it was truly revolutionary.

The sexuality depicted, while not overt, is still notable. The opening shot is of a man and woman's naked limbs intertwined, and there are numerous shots of Riva and Okada canoodling in bed, cavorting in the shower, etc. While the camera is carefully framed to avoid showing anything that would've gotten the film banned, it's quite brazen by Hollywood standards of the time.

Roughly speaking, the first half of the film is about the horror of the Hiroshima bombing, and the second half is about Elle's estrangement from her hometown community after falling in love with a German soldier during the war. In both cases, the other person expresses sympathy and understanding of the tragedy, while the one relating the tale rebutts and rebukes them, saying they couldn't possibly relate.

"You are not endowed with memory," Liu tells her when Elle expresses grief over the bombing.

The first sequence is gripping in its depictions of the damage done to Hiroshima, the city and the people. Employing newsreel footage, Resnais lays bare the terrible burns, deformities and destruction wrought upon Hiroshima in a way that must have been new and shocking to American audiences at the time. Interestingly, the film never mentions that it was the United States that dropped the bomb, or that similar destruction befell Nagasaki. I wonder if this film contributed to the fact that whenever the use of atomic/nuclear weapons is brought up, it is invariably Hiroshima that is evoked and not Nagasaki.

For me the key moment of the film is when Liu asks Elle what she thought when she first heard of the bombing of Hiroshima. He was off fighting in the war, while his entire family perished. He's astonished to realize that most of the world celebrated the destruction of Hiroshima, since it marked the end of the war.

In her, far less compelling section, Elle talks about the loss of her German lover and how the entire town ostracized her. Her hair was shorn off and her own parents locked her in the basement, where she went mad. Her primary regret is not the pain or the abandonment by her family, but the slow, gradual yet inexorable loss of the memory of her first love. In her narration, Elle tells Liu she knows she is destined to repeat this loss with him.

Impressive but not engaging, "Hiroshima mon amour" is a memorable film about forgetting.

3 stars out of four