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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: best actress

2012 Best Actress: Will it be Riva?

07 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

alexandre tharaud, amour, best actress, emmanuelle riva, euthanasia, jean louis trintignant, michael haneke, oscar 2012, romance

amour_t614

“Hospice Pair”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

“AMOUR” IS THE provocative title to Michael Haneke’s latest and most funereal film to date.  Anyone familiar with either “The White Ribbon” or “Funny Games” will look skeptically on such a director delivering any kind of love-story in the traditional mold.  Yet, like its nakedly romantic title,” “Amour” is indeed a romance – Haneke-style.  It centers around the agonizing last days of Anne Laurent, a lifelong music teacher and Parisian esthete who inhabits a quiet apartment alongside her husband Georges.  The9 Laurent home is sparsely decorated – a few fine rugs, a grand piano, a ceramic lamp in Hermès orange – and it reflects their quiet, introverted lifestyle. They are visited by their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) on occasion, but they prefer their record collection and nightly glass of wine (alone).  Still, they foster nothing but intimacy between each other and with Eva who confesses to her father that her husband is having an affair and that her marriage is in crisis.  Sitting at a distance, Georges listens with the impassive stare of an analyst.

Anne looks a bit livelier when their former student Alexandre Tharaud (as himself) comes to call; when the man inquires about his maestro’s recent illness, Anne changes the subject and asks him to play the piano for them.  It was Tharaud whom the couple had gone to see at the film’s start.  Haneke gives us the wide shot of the music hall – Alexandre Tharaud480a shot reminiscent of the puzzling last scene in his “Caché” – and we must find the Laurents politely waiting for the recital to begin. The shot lasts longer than one expects and it demands that we look harder at Anne and Georges, and, it would seem, ourselves as another audience, another mirror.  Less ingenious is the symbolism of the pigeon which keeps trapping itself in the Laurents’ apartment; at first, it’s set free and later, it’s wrapped in a blanket and held closely to Georges’ chest.  Such catch-and-release can be found at the end to James Ivory’s “The Remains of the Day” (1993) where the bird is an obvious stand-in for a character whose wings have been clipped.

Anne is played with the deepest pathos by Emmanuelle Riva, who is 85-years-old and now the oldest nominee for Best Actress in Oscar history.   She will likely lose to a 22-Amour_love_liebe_poster_jean_louis_trintignantyear-old named Jennifer Lawrence for “Silver Linings Playbook.”  But don’t overlook, as Georges, Jean-Louis Trintignant.  He and Anne carry on like any ordinary elderly couple:  morning, noon and night, they occupy a cozy corner of their kitchen where they share tea and nostalgia. All that changes when Anne experiences a lapse in consciousness, the first tremor of her impending illness.  Georges panics as Anne stares into space, and even more so after she appears to have no recollection of her seizure-like absence.   Anne’s health deteriorates quickly and after a series of strokes, she finds herself confined to bed and reliant on Georges to feed, dress, and wash her paralyzed body.

“Amour” is about one woman’s dignity in the face of certain death, but it’s also about a husband and the burden of devotion.  Georges has a slight limp and we watch as he labors about the apartment, as if under house-arrest, in his new role as Anne’s nurse.  We are almost certain, given the opening shot of Anne in her funeral bier, that Georges will become Anne’s mercy-killer. Which is to say that Haneke’s idea of true love is that it is always a commitment and only sometimes a crime.

2012 Best Actress: Will it be Watts?

22 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

action, alvarez belons, best actress, disaster films, ewan mcgregor, indian ocean, juan antonio bayona, naomi watts, the impossible, tom holland, tsunami 2004

the-impossible-movie-review

“Water Works”

Grade: B

TWO ASPECTS OF Juan Antonio Bayona’s disaster film “The Impossible” will haunt you.  The first is the tsunami itself, which slammed into south-west Asia on the 26th of December, 2004, killing nearly a quarter-million people and leveling scores of luxury hotels.  “The Impossible” begins and ends with the Bennett family, Maria and husband Henry (Ewan McGregor), flying to and fro a high-end Thai resort where they open Christmas gifts and lounge poolside. The film’s first fifteen minutes are the lull before the storm and Bayona is even able to extract a frisson of terror out of something as quotidian as a red rubber ball that the Bennett boys – Lucas, Thomas, and Simon – bop around the pool area; they’ll soon find themselves floating out to sea like the ball itself.  Wilson!  A loose page is blown out of the book Maria is reading and gradually, the vacationers notice that something sinister is in the air.  One of the most terrifying images is of the palm trees just beyond the hotel walls being felled, one after another, as the Indian Ocean violently overruns the lazy sunbathers.  Bayona gives us numerous underwater shots in which we see a soup of twisted metal, palm trees, bodies, automobiles reduced to matchbox cars, even a drowned elephant.

The-Impossible-PosterBeyond such verisimilitude, which is agonizing indeed, there is also Naomi Watt’s performance as Maria, a doctor who has temporarily hung up her stethoscope to raise her three young sons while living abroad in Japan.  Bayona built the biggest water tank in Europe to simulate the disaster and, currently making the rounds on TV talk shows prior to Oscar night next month, Watts reports that she was strapped to a chair, submerged, and brought to the brink of drowning in order for the director to elicit true terror from her.  But Watts’s performance is a marvel not simply because of her lung-busting cries – she gave us plenty of those one decade ago in “The Ring” – but because of her relationship with Lucas (Tom Holland), the eldest of her sons. There’s that uncomfortable moment when Lucas is ashamed to see his mother’s mangled and exposed breast; there’s another when Maria insists on helping an abandoned boy whom she and Lucas hide in the treetops. Dehydrated, leg badly injured, Maria shares a soda can with the two boys and stares up at the younger one like he’s a cherub on high.  A good actor, like a good tennis partner, brings out the best in her scene-mate and Watts is able to elevate Holland so that he, too, becomes the emotional core of “The Impossible.”  You don’t doubt for a second that it’s her love for Lucas and the other family members that keep her fighting for her life.

The film’s title is trite, the family’s reunion never really in question, and Bayona (“The22003 Orphanage”) either forgot or simply didn’t feel the need to close the film with the official death toll or some kind of acknowledgment that most, if not all, the tsunami-victims weren’t as lucky as the upper-class Bennetts who had health insurance and private planes at their disposal.  It’s as if every other survivor is put there to either facilitate or frustrate the family’s predictable reunion. The Bennetts are actually an Anglicization of the real-life family that survived the disaster, the Alvarez Belóns of Spain, and it’s a shame that European actors were swapped out for blond-blue-eyed ones. Nevertheless, it’s Watts who powers “The Impossible.”  That’s her kilowatts.

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