Amour

Amour, a Franco-Austrian film written and directed by Michael Haneke, was released in October 2012. In 2012 and 2013 the film received an amazing sequence of awards including the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film Festival, 5 Oscars, 10 French C esar film awards, 1 Golden Globe for best foreign film, and 2 American BAFTAS. Emmanuelle Riva won both the Oscar and the C esar award for best actress, Jean-Louis Trintignant the C esar for best actor and Isabelle Huppert the C esar for best supporting actress. The film presents a middle-class couple in their 80s: Georges and Anne are retired music teachers living happily together in Paris. Their daughter Eva, also a musician, lives abroad with her husband and two children. Yet Georges and Anne’s relationship is suddenly disrupted when Anne suffers a stroke. Attempted surgery fails and Anne returns from hospital with the right side of her body paralysed. Haneke stages emotions which concern each one of us intimately: love, the care for our loved ones, ageing, the horror of losing control over our bodies, and death. He conveys in a realistic mode the concrete difficulties the couple must now face in their everyday lives, allowing us to perceive the deepest expression of their love through intimate gestures which might appear distasteful to those who cannot see beyond physical decay.