2. Amour
Austrian director Michael Haneke is famous for directing the suspense thriller Cache, the dark comedy Funny Games and the English-language remake inexplicably also titled Funny Games, and the haunting Palme d'Or winner The White Ribbon. Given the dark and often frightening nature of his prior works, it seems incongruous that he'd make a film entitled Amour. Amour, Haneke's second Palme d'Or winner, tells the tale of an elderly Parisian couple named Anne and Georges. Anne is a piano instructor who, early in the film, suffers a brief spell where she becomes unresponsive. Anne undergoes surgery, presumably a carotid endarterectomy in which the carotid artery is opened and the possible stroke-inducing plaque is removed. However, after suffering a stroke as a surgical complication, Anne is left paralyzed on the right side of her body. The film continues, it details the daily struggles Anne and Georges endure as her health gradually deteriorates. The brilliant success of this movie lies in the subtleties it employs to realistically portray the couple's hardships. In Yasujiro Ozu's classic film Late Spring, the Japanese master purposefully omits major moments in the characters' lives, including two important weddings. This forces the viewer to focus on the development of the story's protagonists and how they react to the plot turns, rather than the turns of the plot themselves. Taking a page from Ozu, Haneke does not depict the moments of Anne preparing for her surgery or the subsequent stroke. Other important moments later in the film are also not shown, but simply alluded to. In this same vein, Amour works in that it is never manipulative in its emotional moments. There are literally dozens of times in the film where a lesser director would have made the music swell as Georges makes a dramatic speech about his affection for his ailing wife. Haneke is not a lesser director. Instead of occasional moments of heart-warming love or sudden tragedy, Amour is punctuated with delicate small moments the way real life actually plays out. Amour is, simply, a perfect document of something that most couples will at one time endure. And in regards to an emotionally manipulative score that would be employed by sappier filmmakers, Amour, despite its protagonist being a music teacher with a famous up-and-coming pupil, is largely without music. The background silence along with Haneke's prolonged camera takes together make the film feel even more lifelike. Though it depicts the stark realism of waning health, Haneke also immerses the film in symbolic imagery of hope. The movie itself opens with a door being broken down. There are a number of subsequent shots of doors and windows; the couple's home is broken into at the beginning of the film, and Georges is seen closing windows to keep out cigarette smoke or a rogue pigeon. A very significant moment towards the end of the film involves doors, normally the passageway for new scenery and new chapters in life, being locked shut. Amour is truly a modern masterpiece. When I saw it and the film concluded, my two dozen fellow moviegoers and I sat in silence as the end credits silently rolled. For over a minute, not a single person stood up, spoke, or even dared to breathe heavily. Amour had crippled us, broken us like Anne and Georges, a truly mesmerizing feat from a wonderfully compelling and heartfelt film.
Why It Will Win: The most heartfelt movie of the lot.
Why It Won't Win: Its realistic depiction of the end-of-life struggles will be too unpalatable for many viewers. That and Hollywood's fear of any non-English language film.