Like David Lynch, Michael Haneke is another director most famous for his transgressive approach to cinema. Haneke's movies often mine self-reflexive themes, with a body of work which suggests the Austrian is an eternal pessimist incapable of seeing any goodness in humanity. Palme d-Or-winning Amour more than redresses the balance, showing audiences that he's more than capable of depicting human nature at its most tender and compassionate. Amour begins with firemen breaking into an apartment and discovering the corpse of Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), lying on the bed with flowers scattered around her head, then takes us back in time to a night at a concert with her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), and the stroke she has the following morning over breakfast. Rather than Haneke's usual cold, detached directing style, the viewer becomes an intimate witness to Anne's inexorable march towards death and her husband's indefatigable desire to stay by her side until the last moment. It's a powerful and often uncomfortable experience, not least on account of the central performances from Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, the latter of whom sadly (some might say scandalously) lost out on an Academy Award for Best Actress to Jennifer Lawrence. By turns naturalistic and quietly lyrical, it's perhaps Haneke's most perfectly formed film to date.
