Michael Haneke
Amour

Warning (rightfully so): if you are experiencing a moment of despair, if you are depressed on your own, if you're living a great love and, conversely, you are happy, satisfied, and fulfilled, skip this film. In fact, it's a film that no one should see, but paradoxically, everyone should see. But, I warn you, it will tear your soul apart and you won’t come out alive.

Haneke, a brilliant and often overlooked Austrian director, is an auteur who plays at shocking the audience. No film of his can leave the viewer indifferent, whether it be two seemingly respectable neighbors ("Funny Games", 1997), or a mysterious force that no one can fathom ("The White Ribbon", 2009), or a potential voyeur who appears indefinable ("Hidden", 2005). "Amour" (2012) is no exception, perhaps his most extreme work, because it talks about something that will happen to all of us, without exception: aging and falling ill.

I wouldn’t say the film is a chamber play, because it's not set in a single location, but it's close. There are two elderly people, husband and wife, a life together, dreams, hopes, failures, joys, children, work, arguments, all in all, life. You grow old, the children leave home, far away, you continue doing what you do best (in our case, giving piano lessons) in a dignified, genteel, bourgeois house where everything seems in its place, among old black and white photographs, a heap of memories that often pile up untidily, and a slow, but inexorable, daily life. Until one of them, she, falls ill. Cerebral stroke. The illness begins to consume her without mercy, and the husband can only relieve her pain, with love, precisely. That’s all, there’s nothing much to narrate, but there's a lot to see. The long, and terrible, sequences of illness, the cries and pleading for help that can only be human and not divine, are the lifeblood of the entire film, but they are excruciating beyond any permissible limit, almost aiming to wear the viewer down, yet the narrative gimmick used by Haneke doesn’t push the viewer away; instead, it makes them even more involved with the events and devours them from the inside with greater drama. In essence, it’s just a house and two people who have loved each other day after day and continue to do so because there is no alternative. In a respectable and bourgeois house, because death should be dignified, as it is merely the extension of a long or short life.

The two protagonists are astounding, Jean-Louis Trintignant, of course, but Emmanuelle Riva is something indescribable, I would say Oscar-worthy, but even more. In fact, she didn’t receive it (Jennifer Lawrence won for "Silver Linings Playbook," let's not get into that). Haneke's direction is, unsurprisingly, splendid and gentle, hovering over his characters with a rare modesty, without judging, without rising to some sort of moral high ground (did the protagonist do the right thing by wanting to care for his wife until the very last second?). He provides no answers, solutions, or escape routes, he just tells the story. The truth, nothing more. With some incursions from the outside world (the daughter, Isabelle Huppert), but everything remains inside a house that is a kind of sweet box of pain.

It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, as it should have.

"Amour," if you haven’t seen it, don’t watch it. But you should watch it.