By Stephen Applebaum
Monday 12 November, 2012
Michael Haneke has a sense of humour. You might
not realise it watching, sometimes enduring, his tough- minded, often
psychologically and emotionally bruising films, but the Austrian
auteur can laugh at himself. Or rather, at his reputation for
disturbing and uncompromising cinema. Take the last time I met him.
As our discussion about his award-winning study of the roots of
Nazism (and terrorism in general), The White Ribbon, wound
down, he touched on his next project.
"It will be about the decomposition and the
humiliation of the human body in old age," he said blithely.
Perhaps noticing my jaw drop, he added laughing: "So a funny
thing! Another jolly film!"
Haneke chuckles and smiles a lot during
interviews. As a filmmaker, though, he doesn't really do "jolly"
or "funny", not even when the movie itself is called Funny
Games. (I defy anyone to find a single laugh in this harrowing
tale of a bourgeois Austrian family terrorised by two sadistic
youths.) It comes as no surprise, then, that the new French-language
drama to which he alluded, Amour, and which earned the
70-year-old his second Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film
Festival, puts more emphasis on exploring the impact of the
degradations of time and illness than putting a spring in our step.
If old age scares you, you'll find scant consolation here. The film
is about love, but it isn't Love, Actually.
Dressed, as usual, entirely in black, Haneke
reveals the catalyst for Amour. "It reflects a
comparable situation in my family where someone I loved very much
died a terrible death," he says. "[It is about] the
question of how you look upon the suffering of a loved one and not be
able to do anything about it. How do you cope with the pain of seeing
their suffering?"
Asked what he was getting out of working such an
obviously difficult personal experience into a movie, he tells me
firmly that it's none of my business "why" he does a story.
"As a private person, professionally I am invisible," he
asserts, with a laugh that this time feels like a fist concealed
inside a velvet glove.
To be fair this position is in keeping with
Haneke's oft-repeated refusal to say anything that could direct
viewers to think about his work in a particular way. "An artist
is someone who should raise questions rather than give answers,"
he once told me. "I have no message." Often the kinds of
questions he is asking are insoluble, anyway, "and anybody who
claims they have a solution is either a liar or an idiot. When I go
to the cinema, I don't want to be treated like an idiot." His
aim, therefore, "is always to tell stories in such a way as to
involve and question the spectator". Haneke wants to create a
dialogue with his audience, not induce passivity. Films that do the
latter are "boring", he sniffs. "You forget them
immediately after you leave the screening room."
Amour certainly isn't a film you could
forget in a hurry. Set almost entirely inside a spacious Paris
apartment, based on the one Haneke grew up in Vienna, it opens with
the discovery of an old woman's decomposing corpse laid out lovingly
on a bed, surrounded by flowers, and then proceeds to chart the
events that led to this point.
Confronting us with death's inevitability in the
film's opening scene feels like a statement of intent, telling us
there will be no sentimentality, no sweetening of the pill. And so it
turns out. There is no hiding from reality as octogenarians Georges
(Jean-Lous Trintignant, for whom the film was written) and Anne
(Emmanuelle Riva) discover, arguably, the true meaning of love, after
a stroke sends Anne into a protracted and irreversible decline. It is
a painful journey in which the couple's feelings of anger,
frustration, pain, guilt, entrapment and grief, among other things,
are portrayed in almost microscopic detail. As Anne's condition
worsens, she ceases to be herself – the person Georges knew
effectively dying before the body does. This, says Haneke, is
something that's "overwhelming" to watch.
"It's unbearable when someone changes around
you. Just imagine that your life partner changes, then it is
difficult to cope with. Or your mother. Or your father. They were
strong and now they're like a baby – it's not so funny."
The couple, whom Haneke points out are not
modelled on his parents, are former music teachers living in a
comfortable middle-class milieu. This is Haneke's social class and,
he believes, that of most of his audience. He could have made them
financially less well off, of course. But then people might have
missed the point that Amour is a film about the human condition.
"The audience might have reflected on 'Oh, if
only their finances had been better', or 'If only their social
situation had been better', then the situation wouldn't have been as
painful. That's not the case. It's the same for everyone. No matter
where you're from, or which background you're from, this situation is
always going to be terrible."
Some commentators have called Amour the
filmmaker's warmest, most tender and humane (as if his other films
somehow lacked humanity) film yet, and questioned whether it marks a
shift in Haneke and his work. The man himself laughs at the idea. "I
think in most of my other films, too, there were heartwarming scenes.
Even Funny Games. If you look at certain scenes involving
the victims, the couple, there were heart-wrenching, very moving
scenes, too."
If people are responding differently to Amour,
it's because of the subject matter, he suggests, not because he is a
different person. "The film is moving because its about
something we can all identify with. It deals with a theme that has
touched us all. None of us has been spared the pain of seeing a loved
one suffer and go through this. That is what makes it, perhaps, more
universal. That's at least my opinion."
The movie raises all sorts of questions about the
meaning of love and what it might require from us, about the things
that make life worth living and the point when merely existing is not
enough, and much more besides. It is a gruelling, difficult watch,
but then what else would you expect from the man who gave us films
like Funny Games and The Piano Teacher, which
shocked Cannes with female genital-mutilation years before Lars von
Trier's (admittedly more graphic) Antichrist, or the taut
and disturbing psychological thriller Hidden, in which a
couple are terrorised, to nail-biting effect, by an unknown
assailant?
Haneke takes us to uncomfortable places, and asks
us to think about uncomfortable things. Amour makes it impossible not
to think about one's own future. The possibility that we could also
end up like Anne, immobile, bedridden and incapable of feeding or
cleaning ourselves, or having to take the terrible decision that
Georges is ultimately faced with, is hard to imagine. On the other
hand, we could be lucky and go out like Haneke's grandmother-in-law.
"She was 95, she was sitting at a table
surrounded by 20 friends, and at one point she said, 'I am tired,'
and laid her head on the table and died. For me, that is the ideal
death."
Published in The Independent, November 16, 2012
