";s:4:"text";s:3175:" At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, on the eve of Amour‘s win of the coveted Palme d’Or, I spoke to Haneke about the making of this most affecting, and unexpected, movie romance. Even a casual viewer should be shocked that Amour ends as it does, with a murder-suicide as Georges disintegrates. Amour is a movie of rot, one in which kindness and empathy devolve into euphemisms for selfishness. This feature is not available right now. The opening shot of Michael Haneke's "Amour" shows firemen breaking into an elegant apartment in Paris. He seals her room, stalks a bird, puts on his overcoat – vanishes. Amour possesses many of the filmmaker’s touchstones: an austere, majestic visual style, a central couple whose names are some variation of George and Anne, an enclosed setting that allows no exit for either the characters or their demons, and an abrupt act of violence. "Amour" has impressive performances of Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant and is developed in very slow pace, almost theatrically, and is sad to see the elder wife losing her dignity due to her physical and mental problems. The opening shot of Michael Haneke's "Amour" shows firemen breaking into an elegant apartment in Paris. "Old age ain't no place for sissies," Bette Davis is said to have said, and the longer age lasts, the less of a sissy you can be. We know nothing about who lives here, and are told nothing — except in pantomime, as one fireman holds his nose. I almost didn’t make it through “Amour,” which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film on Sunday.
Tweet. "Amour" is a depressing movie about the end of a journey of a retired couple of about eighty and something years old. We tend to identify with the leading character of a film, even if he is a heartless bastard. Once again, Michael Haneke gives us a story about Georges and Anne, the bourgeois couple that, in various incarnations, has populated his films since the 1980s. We know nothing about who lives here, and are told nothing — except in pantomime, as one fireman holds his nose.