----Best Picture at the 65th Cannes Film Festival (Palm d'Or) in 2012
1. Beginning. The film begins with a 70-second long shot of the police finding the old woman dead at home.
2. Concert. The long shot, nearly 120 seconds, to show the waiting of the people in the auditorium at the concert sets the tone for the film.
3. The old wife had a stroke. 215 seconds, 3 and a half minutes of long shots, this kind of performance can only be mastered by veteran actors who have devoted their lives to performing.
This passage is revealing to us the living conditions of this old couple. What should people expect at this age? It seems that they should not have expectations.
The sound of water outside the camera here has become a kind of information that extends beyond the screen. In addition to setting off the atmosphere, it is also used by the director to promote the plot, and then further enhance the atmosphere.
4. After a stroke. In the past, I read a review of "Sister Tao" and praised that the elderly in the nursing home can play chess peacefully beside the crying young people who are saddened by the death of their relatives. It is a great indifference to life and death. But I wonder why they can't see the reaction of the elderly in a hospital when someone is carried into an ambulance. Like the old man who finally chose to walk backwards in the Japanese movie "Zuan Zhuan", ordinary people are somewhat attached to life.
The movie tells us slowly at this time: the wife's greatest pain is not that she can't face death, but that she is completely tired of the torment of human affairs in the face of death - her refusal to go to the hospital is the most direct manifestation.
This is a couple who are equal and respect each other, this kind of equality is so foreign to the Chinese that before seeing the conversation between the husband and the daughter, I wondered if they were together in their later years. This is the difference between Western culture and Chinese culture, and in the film, I feel that this equality is also used to shape the atmosphere of despair. Respecting people's independent choices, always believing that only people can save themselves, and thus confused between selfishness and self-esteem, this is what we need to understand about Western culture.
5. "A long life is really beautiful." At this time, the question arises, how did the wife die at home in the end, and what happened to the husband in the end?
His wife's condition has deteriorated, and she can't find any positive energy in the face of aging. The hypocrisy has made the situation worse, and everything will not get better. I heard from Han Han before that maybe one day in the future, he may not be able to stand his own aging. We can only imagine the future, and "the intersection of imagination and reality is too little."
6. Impulsive. When washing in the morning, the husband heard his wife screaming, and after telling his wife a story to calm her down, it seemed like an old man's impulse, the husband suffocated his wife with a pillow. Then the husband buys flowers for his wife... He slowly catches a pigeon with a towel that flies into his apartment... With magical reality, he and his imaginary wife leave the apartment...
7. About other characters in the movie. Only when a few other characters besides the couple appear in the movie, does it seem that we can feel less hopeless about the couple. Other characters, including the couple's daughter and son-in-law, the building management couple, the two nurses, and the wife's student become other people in the couple's life, contacting them with money and basic greetings, or fundamental miscommunication . Only at this time did I feel that the couple in love were not so desperate.
"Sometimes you are like a monster, but you are gentle." ---- wife said to husband.
"Director Haneke said that these representations do not have unique and profound meanings that are difficult to be interpreted by critics, but are merely an exaggeration of the atmosphere, just like many specific figures and objects in poetry have no actual meaning. But as viewers, we are easily dragged into that apartment by these meaningless representations full of emotions, hearing the tap tick that we forgot to turn off, feeling the temperature of the sunlight in front of the glass window, touching the skin that is gradually losing its elasticity, smelling the seal. The undead room has a more and more frightening smell." ------------- From "The Unbearable, Is It Love or Aging"
View more about Amour reviews
