The first voices I heard about Michael Haneke’s Amour were essentially in complete agreement: beautiful, brilliant, almost unbearably depressing. Having seen it, I’m not sure I agree with that last part.
The film follows a married couple, former music teachers, who live in a Paris apartment, and whose pleasant life of concerts and breakfasts is disrupted when the wife (Emmanuelle Riva) suffers a series of strokes and the husband (Jean-Louis Trintignant) becomes her caregiver. In a sense, the story really is that simple: it is about a woman who is losing more and more of herself and dying, and the film promises from the very outset that she will die, that this is the story of how she will die, and that you will watch her die.
There’s no question that it’s devastatingly hard to watch in places. It is unambiguously about terrible suffering, both on her part and on her husband’s part. It’s enormously sad. But is it depressing?
There’s a reason that, of all the things this story could be called, it’s called Amour. Film titles aren’t chosen at random, and this one is there in particular to recast this story not as a story about suffering and dying but as a story about love. Not at all the typical Hollywood story of love, in which there is dancing and kissing and good times. By the time we meet this couple, Georges and Anne, they have had most, if not all, of their good times. This is a story about the fact that feeling love — forming attachments to other people to this degree — has rewards and it has risks, and that plainly, one of the risks is that something like this can happen to you. This is suffering that follows directly from love; that would not exist without it. For both of them, it would be so much easier if they loved each other even a tiny bit less. You could read into it certain suggestions that hospitals are also bad at caring for the dying, but the majority of the massive hurt here was going to happen anyway; it is failing health plus love.