Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the March issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo on Monday.
Amour
Michael Haneke’s unsentimental study of the decay of flesh and soul couldn’t be opening at a more appropriate time. In the wake of Taro Aso’s clumsy comment about how old people should “hurry up and die” the subject of expiring with some measure of grace and comfort is suddenly topical. The elderly couple in Haneke’s film, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), are neither poor nor isolated from society. They live in an airy, spacious Paris apartment and have a daughter, Eva (Issabelle Huppert), who, while not as attentive as she should be, is nevertheless there when she’s needed. The couple leads an active intellectual life, taking in concerts and keeping up on literature. Haneke hasn’t always been polite in his depiction of this species of European (Cache) but his purpose in showing Georges and Anne at a piano recital and then, more importantly, taking public transportation is to drive home the point that death and illness strikes everyone—poor and rich, conservative and liberal—pretty much the same way. But this is a personal story, as the title implies, and there are important choices to me made when a loved one starts showing signs of fading. Anne suddenly freezes during breakfast, and then returns as if nothing happened, but, of course, something did. Haneke elides the more graphic elements, and in the next scene Anne has already undergone an operation to remove “an obstruction from her carotid artery” that should have gone well but didn’t. We learn this not from the physician involved but from an almost too casual conversation between Georges and Eva, and only after Eva has dominated the conversation with her own trivial worries. The tension between father and daughter, however, is palpable, because neither wants to face the fact that this is the beginning of the end, and it’s this refusal to confront the inevitable that grounds the drama. Perhaps because she knows what she’s in for, Anne wants to talk about it, but Georges resists, and almost perversely decides that he can take care of Anne, bedridden but still in possession of her faculties, by himself. At first, her deterioration is chronicled in subtle ways—a difficulty in opening a book, an avoidance of mirrors—but soon enough, the descent into incontinence and incomprehensibility accelerates. Georges has to hire a nurse, and then fires her in a stupid fit of bourgeois entitlement. As Anne’s condition worsens, the world seems to retreat, the apartment gets darker, and Georges is isolated in his loneliness, chasing pigeons out a window and seeing ghosts. If Haneke is a master of anything it is the abrupt gesture, and when Georges finally decides to act, his desperation is terrifying, because we can see what’s in store for us, too. In French. (photo: Les Films du Losange-X Filme Creative Pool-Wega Film-France 3 Cinema-Ard Degeto-Bayerischer Rundfunk-Westdeutscher Rundfunk) Continue reading →
Anna Karenina
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