The details of the film have faded from Georges’s memory, but he remembers vividly his youthful reaction to it: he was so emotional that it took him a long time to calm down. When he returned home from the cinema, he ran into an older boy who lived next door. This was a boy that Georges looked up to and had always been trying to impress, yet he couldn’t stop himself from crying as he described to him the film he’d just seen. “Telling him the story made all my feelings and tears come back,” Georges tells Anne, “maybe even stronger than when I was actually watching the film.”

In another film, this scene might be a testament to the power of cinema; in Amour, inserted between scenes of Georges struggling to move Anne’s broken body, it feels like a comment on how laughably trivial movies can be. It also sheds light on writer/director Michael Haneke’s most defining quirk: an intense aversion to banality. When one considers that Haneke’s output is among the most dour and least cathartic in all cinema, one can’t help but think that the idea of someone having a benignly positive reaction to Amour is the director’s worst nightmare.

Haneke is a polarizing figure. While it’s hard to deny his brilliance as a director, his films’ preoccupation with the fact that they are films and not real life – and what a very, very terrible thing that is – can feel condescending at times. There tends to be a certain amount of frustration that comes up when talking about Haneke. Even critics who praise his work tend to do so as one praises an unusually well-designed mausoleum.

You don’t need to hear this director compare Pulp Fiction to Nazi war propaganda to know that he fundamentally distrusts the medium in which he works. This distrust is evident in every facet of his work: the stubbornly stationary camera angles, the near absence of music, the way in which we are denied the violent images we expect, only to be ambushed by a sudden, brutal act of violence when we least expect it. The aim of all of this, according to the director himself, is to force us to question what we are being shown.

When I heard that Haneke’s new film would be called Amour, I actually thought the title might be sarcastic. After all, this is the guy who made the most disturbing home invasion film of all time and called it Funny Games. Thankfully, this film really is a love story. Yet it’s such a ruthlessly unsentimental one that the title still feels like a provocation.

This is a film about love where the word love is seldom uttered – perhaps never mentioned by the two main characters – and where all the cinematic shorthand for love has been removed. What we are left with are the quiet presences of two people, their physical bodies, their conversations, the everyday moments they spend with each other. Moments eating, moments meeting friends, moments worrying, and increasingly, moments of Georges caring for Anne. The latter scenes are long, slow, and mostly wordless, and I suspect that it is this film’s willingness to show in detail just how punishing old age can be that is winning it praise even from those normally turned off by Haneke’s grim agenda.

In most films about love it is a choice, a monologue, a letter, or a shedding of tears that “proves” to the audience that two people are really in love. The most beautiful thing about this film, to me, is how much love comes through in the (crazily good) performances of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, even as the director takes great pains to avoid providing us with any conventional cinematic signifiers of love.

Yet even though we can feel love suffusing this couple’s apartment, it’s a love that’s as slippery as a ghost, and much scarier. In 2000’s Code Unknown, which is still Haneke’s most gentle film, the failure of words to communicate feelings was symbolized by a classroom of deaf students playing a game of charades. As a girl crouches by a wall, seemingly shielding herself from something, the other kids make guesses with sign language – “Alone?”, “Hiding Place?”, “Sad?” – to which the girl shakes her head; a poetic reminder that all language is a physical process that can approach but never reach the heart.

This is echoed in Amour in perhaps its most memorable scene, a scene that begins with Georges telling Anne another story from his childhood: a holiday camp that he had hoped would be fun but turned out to be torture. His mother and he had made a deal that if he was enjoying the camp he would draw flowers on his postcard to her, and if he was suffering he would draw stars. Georges drew stars all over his postcard. That’s the best that language has to offer, Haneke seems to be saying.

Yet the shock for longtime viewers of Haneke is how Amour goes one step further. Rather than merely pointing out the inefficacy of language, here we have a powerful emphasis on our moral imperative to listen to words and to act on them – to take communication seriously, despite its failures. At a certain point in the film, Anne has deteriorated to the point where all she says is “mal”, the French word for pain, bad, hurt. In a fascinating moment, one of Anne’s nurses tells Georges that the repetition of the word is just a physical reflex with no meaning – Anne might as well be saying “maman, maman, maman”. But what argument could ever convince someone to ignore their lover repeating the word “pain” day and night? The film shows us Georges tormented by Anne’s words, and his inability to dismiss them might be the greatest testament to his love for her. Words may never be able to adequately describe feelings, but they can point the way, and love requires that we respect them and follow them.

On the surface, Haneke’s modus operandi hasn’t changed at all. The camera still barely moves, the characters still barely smile, the editing is still so phenomenally frugal that every cut feels like it’s accompanied by the Law & Order “shunk-shunk” sound. But two things have changed. One is that the director’s finger-wagging takes a backseat to the moral imperatives of the characters. The second is the inclusion of two highly sympathetic lead characters. Haneke’s films have always been a showcase for mind-blowing acting, but usually it’s of the sadistic, cold, deranged variety. The Georges and Anne in this film might be the first Georges and Anne (the names recur in almost all of Haneke’s films) that I wouldn’t be bummed to know in real life.

Now that Amour has received Oscar nominations not only for Best Foreign Film but for Best Picture, it is probably destined to be the best known and most watched of Haneke’s films in the States. Why is it receiving so many more accolades than his previous work? It might be more philosophically well-rounded, but it’s not any easier to watch. Maybe it’s simply that in portraying the slow deterioration of a spouse, Haneke has finally chosen a subject that frightens us as much as it frightens him. Unlike television, childhood, fascism, war, and cinema itself, aging is something that we are ready to believe is truly horrific.

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I was prepared to hate John Hillcoat’s adaptation of The Road, having been moved a great deal by the novel by Cormac McCarthy. I’d heard that a back story had been tacked on to allow Charlize Theron to emote. I imagined the worst, that the film would attempt to answer why the end of the world happened in the first place, dumbing down the material with the narrative equivalent of guardrails. I was surprised, then, to find the film sticking more or less faithfully to the spirit of the book, avoiding some big confrontational scene in which Charlize’s character meets her fate, allowing her to simply wander into the darkness.

Part of the pleasure of watching post-apocalyptic fare like this is seeing how the auteur renders the physical world. It’s thrilling to see dollar bills strewn on the ground, rapaciously happy billboards standing amid the slag and desolation. The post-apocalyptic genre is a rejoinder to the burdensome noise of consumerism, a glimpse at a future in which the things that we know truly matter–a kind word, a shared meal–will once again regain their currency in our affairs. (McCarthy accomplished this brilliantly in his novel, which Michael Chabon was quick to brand as a work of science fiction. I’d go a step further and suggest that the post-apocalyptic genre no longer be considered a branch of science fiction but a genre unto itself. Imagine if bookstores started shelving The Road alongside The Stand and A Handmaid’s Tale.)

Psst. Isabelle. You've got something on your chin.

Postscript

My last Eyeball post was sometime in January, and I guess my excuse is that I was finishing a book and had a huge teaching load. I’ll endeavor to post more frequently in the near future. But an interesting thing I’ve observed in the interim has been how my movie-watching habits have changed. When Stephen approached me about doing a column for The Rumpus, I jumped at the chance to write about DVDs. In the past six months I got an iPad and have been using the Netflix app, watching stuff via instant streaming. Little discs that spin in a drive are looking increasingly antiquated to me, and I’m starting to feel a little like those guys in the ’90s who were fiercely devoted to their vinyl collections. We knew this day was coming, but I’m finding it harder to think about films as existing in the discrete realms of the cinema and the home screen. I’d be curious to hear how other people prefer to experience films these days.

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The curtain opens to silence, and a screen of black fog slowly dissolves into a long view of a colorless, rural village. Within the first few seconds of his new film, The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke has saturated a world with a sense of unseen yet palpable menace. As the village materializes out of darkness, the cinematographer captures the daylight in black and white, like a forgotten memory briefly retrieved from someone’s mind. Then, a narrator’s voice — clearly that of an old man burdened with a quaver — sets the tone for the story he is about to tell us. His voice is hushed and grave, compelling us to listen; we can hear that he’s been haunted for a lifetime.

Set in Northern Germany just prior to World War I, this unnamed village has retained its feudal caste system. The landowning baron and baroness employ half of the peasant farming population, while the ascetic pastor preaches to a crowded and deferential congregation. (Not since Bishop Vergérus, from Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, have I seen a religious figure this terrifying and severe.) Fifteen minutes pass, then thirty, before we learn who the narrator is, the school teacher, and that he’s a central witness to the recounted events. By delaying the introduction — a way of withholding information from the audience — Haneke immediately elevates the level of tension in an otherwise ordinary setting.

In the first few minutes we are, at once, located in a specific time and place, yet also suffer from a profound sense of dislocation. The school teacher informs us that a series of strange accidents once afflicted the village. We start to see these events as he describes them: A horse and rider stride along a country road, through tall fields of billowing grain. Suddenly, the horse stumbles forward, and his mount is thrown to the earth. The camera is placed directly in front of them so that the viewers vicariously feel the shock of flesh as it slams hard to the ground. During the subsequent investigation, a nearly invisible wire is found, tied between two trees. Who would want to inflict such pain upon, or even murder, the rider, the village doctor?

With this question, the real narrative begins. It is through the doctor’s fall that we are introduced to his children and neighbors, and the rest of the community. While the doctor is recovering in hospital, we find his two children weeping on the staircase. Anna is failing in her attempt to console her younger brother, Rudi, when she is interrupted from her ministrations by the sound of rocks tapping on window panes. A group of school children, verging on, or raging toward, adolescence, stares up at her as she opens the window.

In this and in every scene that follows, Haneke, like a sorcerer of some dark art, is able to sustain the threatening sensation of something about to break. His power comes from the execution of the shot, as the camera keeps pace with Anna’s slow crossing of the room, coupled with the menacing sound of rock on glass. This power to command our attention also stems from his direction of the actors, and their unrivaled ability to disappear inside this recreation of the past, an other world. With one medium close-up shot of the children standing outside the doctor’s window, we instantly intuit that Klara, the pastor’s daughter, is the ringleader. Standing at the head of the pack, her eyes generate an unforgettable coldness.

Are these children responsible for the doctor’s horse riding accident, for the death of a farmer’s wife, for a granary fire, for the kidnap and torture of the baron’s son, for the atmosphere thickening with animosity and mistrust? The terrible beauty of The White Ribbon recalls Alberto Moravia’s novel The Conformist, in which a budding young fascist hunts and torments the neighborhood animals: “Marcello, at that time, was remorselessly, shamelessly cruel, that was perfectly natural, for it was from cruelty that he derived the only pleasures that did not seem to him insipid, and this cruelty was still childish enough to arouse no suspicions either in himself or in others.” It is this preconscious phase for both the villagers, the parents and elders, and the children themselves, that leaves the community in a perpetual state of unknowingness. They are quite literally unable to articulate the thought, or give voice to the idea, that their own progeny could be capable of causing such damage.

How could this village, a microcosm of the society at large, tolerate a series of crimes, of vile, inhumane acts perpetrated against their very own friends and neighbors? Without once alluding to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the beginning of the Third Reich in 1933, The White Ribbon breathes an unholy life into the generation of children who would grow up to become the obedient soldiers and members of the Nazi party. Haneke indirectly asks: What was the genesis of, and who is accountable for, this morally corrupt generation?

Without offering an explicit answer (the children are never found guilty of, nor do we see anyone committing the crimes), Haneke crafts the story like a fable or a grim parable, in which the sole lesson a child can learn is that everyone dies. As subtle and obvious as the missive in Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” the director does, however, offer the viewer a clue: the title of the movie itself. Early in the film, the pastor forces two of his children (including Klara), to wear a white ribbon — a symbol of purity — as a punitive measure for disobeying his authority. Two decades later, many of these same children would be wearing black ribbons around their arms. With one simple inversion, Haneke foreshadows the future of German aggression, and the consequences of its violent immolation.

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