Everlasting love

Michael Haneke’s Amour is about love as we near the end of life and is so painful it isn’t a film to ‘like’ or ‘enjoy’ but is one you do have to see. It’s amazing. It is, effectively, two hours and seven minutes of watching someone die, but it is riveting, and I’m still jangling from it. Haneke has taken the ordinary — getting old; dying; happens to us all; no exceptions — and has transformed it into something so literate, powerful, terrifying, intelligent and extraordinary. I’m still jangling from it, and expect to jangle until at least next Wednesday, if not Friday week. Actually, that’s overoptimistic. This is one of those films that, I suspect, is going to stay with me for life, and I’d best get used to it. As it is, I’ve already booked our holiday for next year. (Turkey, since you ask.)

This is a film which asks: what happens to love when the person you love is no longer that person?

This stars Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva in two of the most shatteringly good performances you will see for an unspecified time period. (Nope. Still not psychic.) They play Georges and Anne, an eighty-something couple who have been married for many years and appear to lead happy, full, active and cultured lives. Both are retired music teachers, and we first encounter them when they return to their Paris apartment after seeing one of her pupils perform in concert. It is a fine-looking apartment, well-furnished, with a baby grand piano, and full of books, music scores and paintings. They’ve had a nice evening, and the pair are pleasantly attentive to each other, in a way which suggests they’ve never stopped talking.

But the following morning, over breakfast, just after she has prepared Georges’s boiled egg, Anne has a stroke.