My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 23): Memorable Older Couples
Amour (2012)
Directed by Michael Haneke
Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva
45 Years (2015)
Directed by Andrew Haigh
Starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay
These two films are remarkable depictions of old age. What they have in common is a wonderful stillness and calm. Each features a long-married couple that is utterly attuned to each other’s strengths, weaknesses, habits, and foibles, so their behaviors seem almost reflexive. There is none of the impetuousness and drama that mark romantic movies about young people finding their way. It is a testament to the Austrian director Michael Haneke (b. 1942) and English director Andrew Haigh (b. 1975) that these uber-familiar couples are not boring or tedious, but instead warm, familiar and reassuring. Of course, outstanding acting helps here too. I think we all would aspire to the marriage quality shown at the start of both of these movies.
Of course change comes to older people as well as to the young, and each of these movies centers on how the couple is changed by a big event. In Amour, a peaceful, predictable morning breakfast is interrupted by Anne’s suddenly staring into space for two minutes, unaware of her surroundings or of her chatting husband. This is the first sign of her decline, shown in medically precise detail over the course of the film. Her “transient ischemic attack” is followed by two strokes and increasing disability. Haneke shows us none of the later acute events, or the hospital visits which would dramatize lesser films. Instead the film stays claustrophobically in their Parisian apartment, as we watch Anne’s decline into a wheelchair, then a motorized wheelchair, then her bed. There are some closely drawn scenes painfully reminiscent to me of my mother’s decline from Parkinson disease. Emmanuelle Riva is stunningly accurate and real in these scenes of decline, neither over-nor underplaying the decline towards death. The only comparable depiction is in Bergman’s Cries and Whispers—but if Bergman shows death as tragic opera, Haneke shows it as a slow, inexorably moving force. What is wonderful about the movie is how, even with his wife slowly dying in the next room, Georges maintains the same kind of calm and assurance that age brings, refusing the admonitions of his daughter (Isabelle Huppert) to hospitalize or do more aggressive care. In the end, we see Georges following the ghost of his wife out of the apartment to an uncertain fate. This ambiguity offers us a mystical non-explanation for the film’s opening scene, where we see firemen breaking into the abandoned apartment and finding Anne’s body decaying, but beautifully laid out with flowers around her head. The film is enhanced by lots of restrained late Schubert piano music (see one of my other favorite films Au Hasard Balthasar), echoing Anne’s career as a piano teacher. Haneke has always been one of my favorite directors, producing films of a wide range of topics, from urban horror (Funny Games, 1997) to the origins of Nazi behavior (The White Ribbon, 2009). This calm depiction of love and aging is among his best.
In 45 Years the English couple Kate and Geoff have an equally blissful partnership, this time in the lovely Norfolk countryside. But their loving, familiar life of morning walks and occasional trips into town is disrupted by Geoff receiving a message that the body of a past friend has been found interred in a glacier in the Alps. It turns out that this person, first identified as a hiking companion who died in a fall, was actually his prior girlfriend….. well actually his fiancée who was pregnant at the time of her death. We learn all this very gradually, as does Kate (a terrific Charlotte Rampling). She gradually realizes that this past event has actually colored their own marriage, and we spend the rest of the film seeing Geoff’s love for his ex-fiancée come back to life while Kate tries to keep her own controlled emotions from jealously running away from her. There are lots of metaphors—old history found iced-up in a glacier, old secrets found in the upstairs attic. Like Amour, all this plays out without shouting or surging adrenaline—we must listen carefully and read between the lines to discern the tormented emotions in play here. This is memorably shown in the ending 45th anniversary party, in which a feature dance (to “Smoke Gets in you Eyes”-a metaphor of self-deception?) seems lovely on its face, until we see Kate’s facial tension. This marriage will not be the same again—45 years notwithstanding. Rampling’s performance is a model of restrained, virtuosic acting that is only possible to portray in film, where closeups can show such subtlety. 
45 Years is marked by less obvious introversion than Amour, which never leaves the Parisian apartment. But the striking camerawork here creates a similar sense of isolation. The director uses lots of shallow focus shots in which one of the two characters is sharply drawn, with the other out of focus in the foreground or background. It’s an effective way of showing the growing isolation of the couple. Like Amour, I admired the continuously restrained tone of the film, which matches the couple’s tempo and affect. These are both masterful works, and are perhaps the best depictions of old age I have seen, better than more glitzy works like The Irishman. If you get in a calm mood, these are worth checking out.
Directed by Michael Haneke
Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva
45 Years (2015)
Directed by Andrew Haigh
Starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay
These two films are remarkable depictions of old age. What they have in common is a wonderful stillness and calm. Each features a long-married couple that is utterly attuned to each other’s strengths, weaknesses, habits, and foibles, so their behaviors seem almost reflexive. There is none of the impetuousness and drama that mark romantic movies about young people finding their way. It is a testament to the Austrian director Michael Haneke (b. 1942) and English director Andrew Haigh (b. 1975) that these uber-familiar couples are not boring or tedious, but instead warm, familiar and reassuring. Of course, outstanding acting helps here too. I think we all would aspire to the marriage quality shown at the start of both of these movies.
Of course change comes to older people as well as to the young, and each of these movies centers on how the couple is changed by a big event. In Amour, a peaceful, predictable morning breakfast is interrupted by Anne’s suddenly staring into space for two minutes, unaware of her surroundings or of her chatting husband. This is the first sign of her decline, shown in medically precise detail over the course of the film. Her “transient ischemic attack” is followed by two strokes and increasing disability. Haneke shows us none of the later acute events, or the hospital visits which would dramatize lesser films. Instead the film stays claustrophobically in their Parisian apartment, as we watch Anne’s decline into a wheelchair, then a motorized wheelchair, then her bed. There are some closely drawn scenes painfully reminiscent to me of my mother’s decline from Parkinson disease. Emmanuelle Riva is stunningly accurate and real in these scenes of decline, neither over-nor underplaying the decline towards death. The only comparable depiction is in Bergman’s Cries and Whispers—but if Bergman shows death as tragic opera, Haneke shows it as a slow, inexorably moving force. What is wonderful about the movie is how, even with his wife slowly dying in the next room, Georges maintains the same kind of calm and assurance that age brings, refusing the admonitions of his daughter (Isabelle Huppert) to hospitalize or do more aggressive care. In the end, we see Georges following the ghost of his wife out of the apartment to an uncertain fate. This ambiguity offers us a mystical non-explanation for the film’s opening scene, where we see firemen breaking into the abandoned apartment and finding Anne’s body decaying, but beautifully laid out with flowers around her head. The film is enhanced by lots of restrained late Schubert piano music (see one of my other favorite films Au Hasard Balthasar), echoing Anne’s career as a piano teacher. Haneke has always been one of my favorite directors, producing films of a wide range of topics, from urban horror (Funny Games, 1997) to the origins of Nazi behavior (The White Ribbon, 2009). This calm depiction of love and aging is among his best.
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