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Reviews
Amour
Consummate acting helps ease a painful watch,
as Michael Haneke describes the ultimate
test of love in a profoundly honest study
of sickness and dying By Deborah Young
Magnificent in its
simplicity and its
relentless honesty
about old age, illness and
dying, Michael Haneke’s
Amour (Love) is a deliberately
torturous watch, one that is
going to weed the master’s fan
club of the lightweights who
went along for the ride with the
morbid mental puzzle-solving
of Hidden and Palme d’Or
winner The White Ribbon. No
riddles to figure out here in a
script that is utterly linear and
unfrilly but at the same time
executed with such clarity that
there is never a false step or
superfluous scene. Career-high
performances from Jean-Louis
Trintignant and Emmanuelle
Riva as a genteel Parisian
couple in their 80s illuminate
the difficult, oft-treated subject
matter, but however upscale
the trappings it’s hard to imagine
this downbeat study can
reach the same audiences as
Haneke’s recent work.
Accessibility is clearly not
the issue, as everything is laid
out in plain sight from the
bang-on opening scene: the fire
brigade breaks down the door
of a spacious Paris apartment
to find a long-dead old woman
lying in bed, her head surrounded
by flowers. The rest
of the film is a claustrophobic
flashback leading up to this
moment.
Switch to a classical music
concert in which only the
audience is seen from the stage
in a single elegant, long-held
shot. Among them are Anne
(Riva) and Georges Laurent
(Trintignant), two music aesthetes
long into retirement. He
hobbles a bit but they seem to
be a cheerful, alert and loving
pair who treat each other with
enormous civility. Coming
home that night, he makes an
offhand comment about how
pretty she looks that expresses
all the tenderness of a life-long
relationship.
Then Anne has her first
stroke, a mild affair mistreated
with an operation (evidently at
Georges’ insistence) that leaves
her half-paralyzed and in a
wheelchair. And so begins their
terrible ordeal, whose outcome
is already known.
Antiviral
Pass the sick bag, there’s a new Cronenberg on the block
By Megan Lehmann
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, DaviD
Cronenberg should be feeling pretty chuffed with son Brandon’s
big-screen debut, a petri dish of high-concept perversity
and cultural commentary teeming with lo-fi ickiness.
A berth in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes — a highprofile
debut — gives Cronenberg Jr. the nod as an embryonic
talent, a genre director with an added kink.
Clearly weaned on dad’s early body-horror films such as Shivers
and Scanners, the 32-year-old Canadian writer-director gives a
sardonic, Cronenbergian twist to a very au courant subject: the
sickness of celebrity worship. It’s a topic ripe with potential, and
the younger Cronenberg takes off down some gratifyingly weird
alleys as he follows the travails of a young man peddling the
viruses of ill celebrities to obsessed fans.
An overly mannered approach throws the pacing off, however,
and some ungainly tilts at exposition are more jarring than the
conventionally repellent close-ups of needles piercing skin.
An obsession with disease and decay is obviously encoded in
32
Moment by moment, the
actors delicately describe
Anne’s descent into physical
and eventually mental debilitation,
while Haneke focuses
with physician-like steadiness
on the test it puts on Georges’
love for his wife. When he steps
out of the apartment to attend
a funeral, she tries to jump out
the window. She feels humiliated
by her condition and hates
to be seen, but she can’t refuse
the agitated visits of their
daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert,
star of Haneke’s The Piano
Teacher, another uncompromising
exploration of love.) Huppert
negotiates a persuasive
middle road, alternating hysteria
and a conventional, teary
reaction to Mom’s plight with a
little chat about investments.
All this serves as a stark
the family DNA, and here it
is visited upon a spindly clinic
worker named Syd March
(Caleb Landry Jones), who
theatrically deteriorates over
the course of the film after he
is infected with a mystery virus
harvested from the body of
starlet Hannah Geist (Sarah
Gadon.)
Against a backdrop of
unhealthy celebrity mania
contrast with her father’s
measured words and behavior
as he tries to keep up Anne’s
spirits and preserve her personal
dignity. Looking back,
the two remember emotional
moments from the past, but
not the events themselves.
After Anne has a second
stroke, Georges bows to the
need for part-time nurses.
The degenerating nature of
her illness is very painful
to watch, as she gradually
loses the power of speech and
seems to return to a state of
early childhood, inarticulately
crying out in pain.
If Georges and Anne find
no emotional support from
family, there is not the slightest
vestige of religious comfort in
the household. Society is simple
absent, and even the funeral he
Landry Jones
studies celebrity
viruses in Antiviral.
— trashy magazines and nonstop TV coverage serve as wallpaper
— Syd and his cohorts at the Lucas Clinic work to exploit the
desire of the most rabid fans to get closer to their idols. They buy
strains of live viruses from the famous and inject them into paying
customers as the ultimate form of communion.
Cinematographer Karim Hussain shoots these early scenes
starkly, making them sterile and whiter-than-white, perfectly
primed for when the blood begins to flow.
Syd supplements his income by smuggling viruses out in his
own body to sell to black marketeer Arvid (Joe Pingue), owner of
a butcher’s shop that flogs celebrity cell steaks (best not to ask.)
day6_reviews_b.indd 1 5/20/12 8:25 PM