He’s no softie
Michael Haneke’s new film is tender but still has his touch
>>> CANNES, France — Two months ago, the Austrian director Michael Haneke turned 70, which might explain why he recently took a turn from his provocateur past to make “Amour,” a tender movie about a Parisian couple struggling with old age.
But ask Haneke if the prospect of that personal milestone informed the poignant tone of his new French-language film and he’ll demur.
“It was simply the subject that called for this treatment,” Haneke said from a hotel suite at the Cannes Film Festival, where his movie premiered to rave reviews and on Sunday brought the filmmaker his second coveted Palme d’Or. “If I was making a movie about a different subject, it might have demanded a different kind of treatment.”
Upon being gently reminded that it was he, after all, who chose to make a movie about this tender subject in the first place, the writer-director gave a sly smile and said, “If you’re asking whether I’ve become a nicer person, well, you’ll have to ask
my wife.”
Always crisply courteous in person, Haneke, a former critic, has spent the last 15 years making films that are anything but polite.
The intergenerational sex drama “The Piano Teacher” (2001), the tense immigrant-themed thriller “Cache” (2005) and the brutal home invasion film “Funny Games” — a disturbing meditation on violence and voyeurism that Haneke made once in German in 1997 and remade in English in 2007— established his reputation for uncomfortable material and unsettling scenes handled with a cool yet effective remove.
“Amour,” which Sony Pictures Classics will open in New York and Los Angeles on Dec. 19, is a different animal. The movie is a restrained story of a musically inclined octogenarian couple, Georges and Anne (played by the legendary French actors Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva), who are thrown for a loop when Anne suffers a stroke and her health begins to decline.
Hardly in great health himself, Georges must then care for his wife while he attends to his own feelings of grief.
The film’s depiction of a struggling elderly couple stirred strong reactions among festival-goers and critics, who praised Haneke for capturing both the melancholia of aging and the capacity for spousal dedication.
Haneke says he went through a personal experience similar to Georges: “At a certain point almost everyone is confronted with a situation like this. It happened to me — I looked at someone I loved deeply and watched them suffer, and that made me want to make this film.” (He declined to elaborate further.)
The notion of a sentimental Haneke might prompt some fans to wonder if he’s gone soft.
Those fans, however, don’t have much to worry about with “Amour” — there are still some trademark shocking touches, including one jolting moment that improbably mixes violence with tenderness.
“You always hope every scene is strong, but it’s nice when certain scenes have an effect,” he said with a playful glint in his eye.
Haneke last made “The White Ribbon,” a 2009 blackand-white period piece that netted the filmmaker his previous Palme d’Or. Set in 1913 and 1914, the film, which Haneke also wrote, spirals around a series of violent and criminal acts in a provincial village in Protestant northern Germany; it went on to earn two Academy Award nominations, for foreign-language film and cinematography.
That film required a great deal of historical research, and Haneke explained that while preparing for “Amour” he found himself spending weeks quietly observing elderly patients in hospitals and speaking to nurses about the banalities of their jobs.
The prolific Haneke said he’s working on a new idea, and that it’s “a bit bigger” than the intimate “Amour.”
But right now his focus is on getting audiences interested in seeing this latest movie — despite the film’s heavy air of mortality, he believes it’s accessible and relevant to a cross-section of people, not only older viewers.
“I really do think that it appeals to all ages,” he said.