Amour (2012)

Amour (2012)

By: Ghost Writer

We all have experienced the death of a loved one, No? Well, sad news, hate to tell you, but it will happen sooner or later, and that's perhaps the main reason Michael Haneke's Amour is such a universal masterpiece, dealing directly with something we are going to face one day, whether we like it or not, death's might be life's only certainty.

My mother died of cancer more than a decade ago, the last month of her life, she received chemotherapy, it was very hard to watch her suffer that way, getting weaker and dying day after day, slowly losing her vitality, I have seen too many people angered by the suffering of a loved one, their wish is to keep that person with them forever, in my case, I wanted my mother to rest in peace, it was painful, yes, but it was more painful for her to suffer that way, the wish to keep someone with us might be a little bit egotistical given the fact that the person could be suffering deeply and not being able to regain its previous condition before the disease.

Austrian director Michael Haneke is a master of torture, his Funny Games was really painful for me to watch, it was not Audition, the Japanese movie, and the hardest movie for me to watch, but Haneke really knows how to make you suffer, the way he manages cruelty into his stories is close to the poetic heights Quentin Tarantino is able to get thru violence,  but this time, Haneke has managed to make a major shift in his modus operandi, shocking us with an unsuspected twist into his trail of stories full of pain.

Amour is about love, and the hard part of it, it is an old couple and how the life of one of them starts to degrade, illness becoming an obstacle in well living, and finally a tough decision that shouldn't be so difficult in the first place, but one that shouldn't be so hard to take, and to perform.

Amour leaves us the sometimes hard job of thinking for ourselves and considering if it's fair to keep our loved ones with us time after their living conditions are affected to the point of no return, and when a final decision has been made, how should we carry on with it.

In the end, I guess civilization and moral have made it tougher, I guess years ago it was just natural for us to simply go and fade away, but science has sometimes given us false expectations that we are alive after we are unable to take care for ourselves, to walk by ourselves, to eat by ourselves, or to clean ourselves, I may love my mother so much, but I was happier that she died and that suffering ended, but Haneke knows how to hurt us and he lets the subtle torture make us suffer during his great story.