Amour

Georges and Anne are retired music teachers in their eighties, sharing a Paris apartment lined with books and a piano. Anne suffers a stroke, and then a second; her body and her speech fail by degrees. Georges takes on her care alone, closing the front door on the world and on their grown daughter's alarm. Almost nothing happens outside the flat.

Haneke films the decline with a fixed, patient camera and no music to soften it. Critics praised the two leads above all: Jean-Louis Trintignant's stubborn tenderness as the husband, and Emmanuelle Riva's account of a woman losing her faculties without losing her presence. The result is austere and exact, and it withholds every easy comfort.

For the clinician the film holds dependency and dignity together as a single problem: the long marriage now lived from one side. Georges's love and his exhaustion are inseparable, and the daily tasks carry an anticipatory mourning that neither names. The closing turn follows what the unbearable can drive a person to, and it neither judges nor absolves.