Of all the films on this year\u2019s Best Picture list, the one I could have most happily have done without is clearly Michael Haneke\u2019s Amour<\/i>. I\u2019ve not seen much of Haneke\u2019s output, but what I have seen I have admired rather than enjoyed. Funny Games<\/i> is ferociously original and extraordinarily confrontational, but it\u2019s hard to believe that it could be anyone\u2019s favourite as it\u2019s such disturbing viewing. Cach\u00e9<\/i> seems designed to be deliberately frustrating. It contains some truly amazing moments, but by initially presenting a traditional mystery-plot and then providing very few coherent answers, it doesn\u2019t play fair and it\u2019s hard for me to know if it\u2019s really about anything or not. I haven\u2019t seen The Piano Teacher <\/i>or The White Ribbon<\/i> but after Amour<\/i>, maybe I will.<\/p>\n
The story is very simple and straightforward. Georges and Anne (apparently very many of Haneke\u2019s protagonists share these names) are a dignified septuagenarian Parisian couple, living out their days in their spacious apartment and going to recitals given by their erstwhile pupils. Over the course of the film, Anne suffers a series of strokes which leave her progressively less able to look after herself, or to communicate clearly. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Georges and Emmanuelle Riva plays Anne.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s about it. Two people who love each other, who have loved each other for five decades, perhaps longer, who are losing each other, because \u2013 well, because that\u2019s what happens. At first glance, Haneke\u2019s chilly, detached style seems an odd match for such emotionally draining material, but actually his clear-eyed objectivity is exactly what is required to prevent this simple story from slipping into melodrama or mawkish sentimentality. When Georges snaps at his daughter (Isabelle Huppert) who tries to tell him how concerned she is about her mother \u201cWhat good is your concern to me?\u201d I suspect that\u2019s the director\u2019s voice in the narrative.<\/p>\n
Time and again, Haneke simply places the camera and mercilessly observes as something awful, or simple, or banal, or appalling unfolds. Actors enter or leave the frame, are shot from behind, or wander away from the camera. Take after take is simply allowed to happen \u2013 at a rough guess there are maybe 50 cuts in the two-hour running time. There\u2019s no room to hide, nowhere to go to evade the truth of what is happening. When Haneke does cut to a close-up, it seems shockingly intimate.<\/p>\n
Trintignant is wonderful as the stoically dignified Georges but Riva is astonishing in her depiction of Anne\u2019s pathetic decline. Partly because of the restrained shooting style, but also because of Riva\u2019s skill and dedication, it\u2019s almost impossible to believe that this is a relatively fit and able-bodied performer and not documentary footage of a real stroke victim.<\/p>\n
The final scenes offer something a little more figurative, something a little less literal, without unduly sacrificing coherence, which provides a welcome additional note – ironically for a story about music teachers there’s almost no music and none of it is non-diagetic, not even over the credits. A key visual theme is that of intrusion or invasion. The first shot is of a door being broken down. The state of various doors and windows in the apartment \u2013 open or shut, locked or unlocked \u2013 is of perpetual interest. A pigeon twice flies in through the window and proves difficult to evict. A neighbour trying to be helpful lingers on the threshold a little too long. Huppert\u2019s English husband is unwelcome company. Even the business-as-usual breakfast scene which precedes Anne\u2019s first attack shows Georges cracking open an egg. This debilitation invades their loves, tries to destroy their love for each other and nothing they do can possibly get rid of it.<\/p>\n
Far more complete, for me, than Cach\u00e9<\/i>, this is still an awfully hard film to love. I\u2019m very glad I saw it, but there\u2019s zero chance of me buying it on DVD and no time I can think of when I\u2019d ever see it again. Since it is also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, I assume it is a shoo-in for that and has no chance at the main prize. Emmanuelle Riva is up for Best Actress though and that would be well-deserved, although she is up against stiff competition.<\/p>\n
Seeking some respite in the world of fantasy, I also took in Life of Pi<\/i>. The latest in a series of \u201cunfilmable\u201d novels which have somehow nevertheless found their way into cinemas recently (see also Cloud Atlas<\/i>, Tristram Shandy<\/i>, The Naked Lunch<\/i> and so on). The problems with filming Yann Martel\u2019s novel (which I haven\u2019t alas read) are twofold. Firstly, much of the action takes place with a single human character adrift at sea in a small life boat. Secondly, the other major character is an adult Bengal tiger. So even if you solve the problem of a single-person narrative, you are left with the technical challenge of realising the actions of a large carnivorous mammal in close proximity with your leading actor, and in a watery environment. Even a handful of years ago, this would been utterly impossible to render convincingly. Spare us from the Jim Henson version of Life or Pi<\/i> let alone the Ray Harryhausen incarnation.<\/p>\n
What we get is so blindingly and stupefyingly convincing that I can\u2019t even begin to speculate about how it was achieved. I\u2019m sure a tremendous\u00a0 amount of CGI has been deployed, as well as presumably at least some footage of a genuine animal, but the digital rendering of muscle and bone and whisker and fur is now so perfect that the join, if it even exists at all, is completely invisible. The version I saw was also in so-called 3D which added very little, if anything at all.<\/p>\n
As far as I can tell, the storytelling is very faithful to the book. The adult Pi tells a visiting author his story, beginning in childhood with how he acquired his name, filling in details of his young life and the fateful decision by his father to move the whole family and their menagerie of animals from India to Canada. During a storm, all on board are killed, and only Pi escapes together with a zebra, and orang-utan, a hyena and the afore-mentioned tiger. When the tiger has consumed the others, Pi has to catch fish for it and train it to allow it to share the lifeboat with him.<\/p>\n
Whereas Michael Haneke simply places the camera and lets the actors talk or make breakfast, director Ang Lee can\u2019t even cut from one time period to another without some kind of visual flourish, but this richer cinematic language helps ground the fantastic imagery in a coherent artistic framework. He\u2019s helped too by lovely performances, especially Suraj Sharma as the 16 year old Pi who carries almost the entire middle of the movie solo, and Irrfan Khan (familiar from Slumdog Millionaire<\/i>) as the adult Pi, telling blocked novelist Rafe Spall his amazing story, with a genial twinkle.<\/p>\n
If there\u2019s an issue I have with the adaptation, it\u2019s the use of this author character. He\u2019s essential to assist in the delivery of the punchline, which provides both a welcome shot of vinegar in a world which threatens at times to become too sickly, too cloyingly fantastic, and which broadens the scope of the narrative to become a story about stories, rather than just a fairy tale. Just as the young Pi refuses to pick just one religion, just one way of interpreting the world, so the adult Pi won\u2019t provide just one way of understanding what happened to him out on that lifeboat. But it\u2019s clumsy that once the shipwreck occurs, Spall drops out of the movie almost entirely, only to pop up again at the end when we\u2019d all but forgotten about him.<\/p>\n
The penultimate sequence on the island is also a little hard to swallow. To be sure, much of what happens on the boat is unlikely, but none of it is actually impossible. What happens on the island seems much more like fantasy \u2013 maybe the shift is less noticeable in print, but in pictures it jarred for me.<\/p>\n
Life of Pi<\/i> is very, very charming and an amazing technical achievement. It\u2019s an apparently simple story with something interesting to say about how we look at the world, but the two parts of the narrative are never truly braided together which makes the pseudo-reveal at the end feel almost like a footnote, or a scholarly commentary, rather than an intrinsic part of the narrative. It\u2019s a fine piece of cinema, but it wouldn\u2019t be my pick of film of the year. So far, that honour still goes to Argo<\/i>, but I have Zero Dark Thirty<\/i>, Beasts of the Southern Wild<\/i>, Silver Linings Playbook<\/i> and of course Lincoln<\/i> still to go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Of all the films on this year\u2019s Best Picture list, the one I could have most happily have done without is clearly Michael Haneke\u2019s Amour. I\u2019ve not seen much of Haneke\u2019s output, but what I have seen I have admired rather than enjoyed. Funny Games is ferociously original and extraordinarily confrontational, but it\u2019s hard to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[329,332,330,331,13,19],"class_list":["post-1285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","tag-amour","tag-ang-lee","tag-life-of-pi","tag-michael-haneke","tag-oscars","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-kJ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1285"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1289,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions\/1289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}