If I’m going to make the 3:30 pm screening of the Weinstein Co”s The Sapphires (“an Aboriginal Dreamgirls,” a friend tells me) I have to bolt in 20 so here’s what I tweeted about Michael Haneke‘s Amour earlier this morning:
Tweet #1: “Michael Haneke’s Amour is a very finely made, corrosively honest and delicately realized Chinese water-torture movie about slowly dying and loving mercifully right to the end.”
Tweet #2: “Jean-Louis Trintingnant and Emmanuelle Riva deliver frank affecting performances as an 80-something couple coping with drip-drip finality.”
Tweet #3: “But who apart from that certain strate of cultivated urban filmgoers will pay to see Amour? My 80something mom and her friends at her assisted-living facility would turn it off if they saw it on DVD, trust me. They watch escapist dreck in their TV room. Never films of substance.”
Tweet #4 and #5: “I spent half my Amour-watching time deciding what form of suicide I’ll choose when I get that old and my life becomes that pathetic. Pills. As romantic as it sounds, I don’t want to be torn apart by wild beasts. I want to expire on a nice couch while watching a Bluray of Derzu Usala.”
Tweet #6 and #7: “I don’t know how the boomers are going to handle death in their ’80s and ’90s, but I’m betting many will go by their own hand…but with flair. Amour is two hours and 7 minutes long. Sublime and refined and honest and sensitive, but old age and withering away with diapers is not for sissies. I know — I saw my father do it four years ago.”
Tweet #8 and #9: “Amour deserves and will get much respect critically, but nobody wants to die like this or watch this process. This is how it’ll possibly be, says Michael Haneke, if you’re lucky enough to have a partner who cares as deeply and tenderly as Trintignant does for Riva. Great!”