Amour (2012)

I've been working on this review since the day I saw this movie in the theater back in 2012, and just never got around to completing it. Life is short. Get things done. In my looking at reviews of the film over the years, I was struck with how so many of them were so personal, dealing less with the film itself than what it stirred in them, detailing the struggles those reviewers had with their elderly parents and their frailties. I notice that I couldn't escape that, either, when I started writing the review way back when.

Let's Face the Music and Dance
or
The Semi-Quavers in the Fugue State

I've had a bit of experience with the disease named Alzheimer's and a bit with strokes. Basically, it boils down to wires and chemicals. The precision with which one's life is led (or followed) gets gummed up, and the gears start to jam, corrode and fail and the dance-steps we've learned as adults fade away, leaving us mentally flailing and physically incapacitated.

Whatever dignity we've cloaked ourselves with unravels and we become as helpless as babes. Every mechanism fails, until we get to the core processes of eating, breathing, beating...which, one by one, give out...and we stop being. Not just being who we are. But just being. 

I've also had enough experience to know that this process doesn't have a logical, linear progress. You don't "just go downhill" (were it that easy). Things run in cycles, like electric current: you're up, you're down. You have a good day, then boom, your legs go out from underneath you. Recovery takes longer and the "down" days extend and eventually, in one those valleys, you'll breathe your last. We don't have a choice when and how. We don't have any choice. No one born gets out alive.

It's the life we have a choice over, and the how of it. Until then, we hang on...for our dear life.

Michael Haneke's Oscar-winning film Amour ("Love," of course, in translation) starts with a puzzle. Firemen break down a sealed door in a Paris apartment and find the body of Anne Laurent (Emmanuelle Riva), laid out in death, holding flowers, her body ringed with cut asters. As with Caché and The White Ribbon, the first segment gives us a challenge the rest of the movie will answer (but not completely). Why is she there? Why is no one else? Where is her husband (Jean-Louis Trintignant), her main caretaker? What happened? Why this? Why does the daughter (Isabelle Huppert)—who visited often—not know anything about it?

The late Anne Laurent was a music teacher (retired) and an acclaimed pianist. She takes joy in music—as does her husband Georges (also a retired music teacher). They take delight in the accomplishments of their former students, including Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud) and, in fact, their last big outing together was to see him perform in concert, although, he is wont to pay a visit from time to time to their cubicled apartment to play for the two of them to their obvious joy and—let's face it, envy—as the two of them, both in their 80's, can't possibly play with the dexterity they used to have. The joy is in the witnessing, not the doing.

The concert is a treat, quite out of the routine of their day-to-day of meals and reading and light chores. But, the night after the concert, at one of those typical meals, where there is the casual conversation—or not—Georges notices that Anne goes quiet and becomes absolutely still, not registering anything, not even when he attempts to get a reaction out of her. She sits there, catatonic, and doesn't revive until Georges is already trying to get help—something she refuses (she's fine!), certainly not any medical attention. And she resists any trip to a doctor's...until she finds that she is quite incapable of pouring herself a drink.

What that "still" incident entailed was a stroke and she has an operation to unblock her carotid artery to prevent anymore of those by increasing the blood-flow to the brain. But, the operation ends up paralyzing her on her right side and she is confined to a wheelchair. The hospital visit was traumatic enough that she makes Georges promise that she will never be sent to the hospital again, and he dutifully agrees.

The strain is wearying, though. Their daughter insists that she be sent to a nursing facility, but Georges will not go back on his word to Anne, employing a nurse three days a week. Anne has a second stroke, leaving her bed-ridden and with dementia. For Georges, the promise he's made to her is inviolable, but it does not make it easy, having to contend with the quality of nursing—some are fine, but there's that one that's slightly abusive that he has to let go—and the gradual shrinking of life that goes with the shrinking of ability.

It is gutting, and I can't imagine someone who hasn't lost someone to a protracted debilitating disease having any understanding of what transpires, like how some viewers who'd never known the reality of "survivor's guilt" trying to comprehend Saving Private Ryan. It's a tough movie to watch, but it's completely understandable if you've been a part of the roller coaster of emotions that rush at you when someone you love is becoming more still. It is not enjoyable, but you appreciate it because writer-director Haneke "gets it." All the conflicts, all the false hopes and truly dark places one goes when you see a love dying. It's a whirlpool that one can fall into if one isn't strong enough to beat back the current.

 

But, you appreciate that truth. Even if it opens a scarred-over wound.

The White Ribbon (2009)

This was written at the time of the film's release. Damn my eyes for being prescient.

And thematically, it has a lot to do with the film we'll present tomorrow (which I'm furiously editing to make it more about THE FILM, and less of a rant—it might be pretty short!). 

"Das Dorf der Verdammten" 

  

In memory, a tailor recalls 15 extraordinary months when the village of Eichwald, Germany was beset by tragedies that divided the populace, as small as it was. The town is a self-sufficient cell, run by a Baron, who is a somewhat benevolent provider and moral leader in the Protestant community, the town's schedule built around the growing seasons and the natural order of things. All is calm in the Lynch-ian manner of normal.

 
But, the tenant-farmer's wife is killed in an industrial accident when she falls through a rotten floor-board into the gears of machinery, the doctor cannot save her, and the family is thrown into despair—some seeing it as an unfortunate accident, others blame the Baron for the negligence of the floor's up-keep. It becomes either The Way Things Are, or a conspiracy and a schism occurs amongst the reverent.

Soon, other "accidents" occur: the doctor suffers an injuring fall when his horse is fallen by a trip-wire. The Baron's cabbages are scythed into pulp, and his son is found hog-tied and beaten. The Baron's wife is horrified and takes her son to a retreat in Italy. Relationships implode and families are torn asunder, and no one can figure out why. The incidents escalate, and no one does anything.

Parallel to this story the teacher (who will age to become the Narrator) begins a chaste romance with the Baron's nanny, and notices a change in his students—they're becoming more rebellious, less prone to obedience, something noticed also by the Minister, who, in an attempt to impress his brood, ties a white ribbon in his eldest daughter's hair and a white sash around his first son's arm to remind them of their "innocence and purity" when they were younger. But, what was once a declaration of love and pride in their early years is now a punishment.

This is another of what we can now call director Michael Haneke's "Fables"—small stories of incident with lessons that reflect a larger truth about mankind and history. Shot in color, but processed in a distancing and denatured black and white, the shadows of the interiors of the houses are sometimes impenetrably dark and some individuals are made out only at the bare margin of perceptibility. Perception is important in The White Ribbon, (aka Das weiße Band) as it reflects what we see when we want to see it and how we interpret it. That parts of the escalating problems plaguing Eichwald in The White Ribbon are due to hubris and denial.
The film and incidents end at the assassination of the Arch-duke Ferdinand, where, of course, everything starts to go down-hill, but even at the start of the slide, implies Haneke, the seeds of the Holocaust were sewn in the fields of a blind aristocracy. 

And Fascism begins at home.

♪ "Tomorrow Belongs To Me..." ♫

Caché

Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005) Pronounce it with the accent, please, because it doesn't refer to a hiding place. The french is an attribute, as in "hidden," "secret," or "covert." "Caché" is all of that, and more taking a small situation and blowing it up in the background until it becomes an indictment of a secret sin, not only of an individual but an entire country.
I forget which of the early astronauts said it, but when asked to describe space-flight he drawled: "It's hours of boredom punctuated by moments of blind terror." He could have been talking about life, as well. And so, too, is "Caché," sly enough to take what might be boring for a viewer and turning it into a subtle trick, like the dinner guest depicted in the film who tells a long and involved story only to have it explode in the punch-line. That risk of boredom is the key, for Haneke employs long unbroken takes, sometimes not even moving the camera, but employing a stock-image—a staging area—through which the world and his characters move. The longer it takes, the more anticipation is built up in an audience; one begins to question why one is looking at something for so long, and then to look for the importance of that image and one's senses go on alert: what is that in the corner of the frame?; is it a still image, or is something moving?; one hears the doppler of a car-engine and anticipates its entering the frame. Why are we here, and why are we looking at this, are the questions.*

The answer is a joke and also a key to the suspense of the story. A well-to-do nuclear family—he (Daniel Auteuil) is a televised literary critic and she (Juliette Binoche) is a book publisher, their son, a diffident middle-schooler—begin receiving mysterious video cassettes wrapped in violent child's drawings. Viewing the cassettes, the couple realize they're being targeted and monitored, but they don't have a clue as to why or by whom. The answer must be some secret one or the other is hiding, and soon the couple are quibbling and quarrelling...and keeping their own secrets from each other.

Haneke is an austere film-maker with a trickster's heart—his most controversial film is the sadistic Funny Games which he made in both European (1997) and U.S. (2007) versions—and here, it's basically the same gambit but without the smirking meta-smugness. Here, its about story-telling (and audience puppeteering), his camera moves are controlled, liking riding on a secret rail, formal and distancing, not so much mindful of Hitchcock, as Brian De Palma's magically smooth and impersonal camera-glides, just an extension of those monitoring tapes, coolly surveying.

But the film is punctuated by the rare burst of upsetting violence that occurs quickly (so quickly it takes a moment to register..."Did they just...?") and is usually the end-point of a strategy (real or imagined) by the players. One is left contemplating responsibility as the characters in the play do, with no end (or conclusion) in sight. It's frustrating, but not false, and gives the film the grit of reality...while also keeping an audience on the edge of their chairs waiting for the next shock.

Mon Dieu, où est Waldo?

* One of my favorite shots in Bryan Singer's film-career (there aren't many) occurs in The Usual Suspects, when at one point in the movie there is a short sequence where, once the movie is over, we realize "that was a shot of nothing." No importance, whatsoever, except as a red herring thrown to the audience to play on their suspicions and ability to anticipate plot-points.