Amour

In the first scene, firemen break down the front door of a Paris apartment. Michael Haneke's 'Amour' is devastatingly original and daring in the way it examines the effect of love on death. 

 Georges(Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne ( Emmanuelle Riva) have been married many years, and have grown old together. Both of them are retired piano teachers. One morning, they are eating breakfast together and Anne goes silent. She doesn't respond to Georges as she sits in a confused state. Georges tries to get her attention but she doesn't answer anything. Anne needs to undergo surgery on a blocked artery, but the surgery goes wrong leaving her partially paralyzed. She makes Georges promise not to send her back to the hospital. Their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) wishes for her mother to go into care ,but Georges doesn't want to break the promise he made to Anne. 

 Georges and Anne are played magnificently by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva. Both of them make the pain and sorrow of their rapidly deteriorating lives very believable to the viewer. Isabelle Huppert also gives a good performance in a short role. This is a straight story of a couple who face the trials of their advanced age with indifference but also humanity.

However this film is not so simple as it is a Michael Haneke film after all.  What Haneke's story and screenplay brilliantly achieved is to be able to say so much without saying much at all, making it a very fulfilling experience watching. It has all the stamps of the Haneke cinema- the long stills, the quiet camera movements, the absence of music,the sense of mystery. There are a handful of sequences that cross the metaphysical plane of the film,including the quietly interpolated view of various landscape paintings. Above all,it is the normality that hits hardest. We all know what is going to happen to all of us yet none of us is prepared for it.