18 March 2013-03-18

Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva

Out in the UK this week Amour (Artificial Eye, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) Whatever you say about the director of Hidden or Funny Games,  no one does “pitiless gaze” quite as well as Michael Haneke. In Amour he takes one of  his standing obsessions, the life bourgeois, and yokes to it a subject rarely covered in film – the loss of dignity and disappearance of the self that happens to most of us as death comes close. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva are the film’s focus, playing a pair of sprightly retired piano teachers whose quietly tasteful, cultured lifestyle is interrupted when one of them has a stroke. What follows is harrowing but almost inevitable, the … Read more