Amour
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and an Official Selection at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival®, master director Michael Haneke’s Amour draws on the extraordinary talents of two of the finest and most legendary performers in the history of French cinema — Jean-Louis
Trintignant (The Conformist, Trois couleurs: Rouge) and Emmanuelle Riva (Hiroshima mon amour) — to create a powerful and moving portrait of an elderly couple struggling with their mortality.
Ensconced in an apartment that fits them like an old glove and settled happily into their long-established domestic routines, retired music teachers Anne and Georges Laurent have their comfortable world cataclysmically upended when Anne suddenly displays symptoms of a stroke. With Anne now partially paralyzed, Georges struggles to care for her at home, with each day bringing new, painful challenges. A visit from the couple’s dutiful daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert, 8 Women, I Heart Huckabees) only further indicates how distant Georges and Anne’s lives now are from the rest of the world — a private realm
that grows ever more solitary as Anne slips slowly, unbearably away.
It would have been easy with material such as this to slip into the conventions of a tearjerker, but Haneke unerringly steers clear of sentimentality, cliché or bathos. Humane, compassionate, and featuring exquisite performances from three of cinema’s greatest actors, Amour is a magisterial work from one of contemporary cinema’s most brilliant and fearless artists.
CRITICAL NOTES
"Transfixing and extraordinarily touching, perhaps the most hauntingly honest movie about old age ever made." —Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
FILM INFORMATION
Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva and Isabelle Huppert
Year: 2012
Runtime: 127 minutes
Country: Austria, France, Germany
Language: French, English
Distributor: Mongrel Media
Ratings:
ON NR /
BC NR /
AB NR /
SK NR /
MB NR /
QC NR /
Maritmes NR
SCREENING DATES