The 10 best films of 2012, No 3 – Amour

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/dec/12/best-films-amour-michael-haneke

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At 70 years old, Michael Haneke is now a double Palme D'Or-winner at Cannes and has moved appreciably ahead of those controversial figures, such as Lars von Trier and Gaspar Noé, with whom he was once bracketed. His work, while not really softening in any way, now has a more human and personal resonance and his latest film, Amour, is an accessible story of great simplicity.

As well as everything else, it has been another example of his extraordinary formal technique, like that of the musician he hoped as a young man to be. He has cast two legends of the French cinema, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, as Georges and Anne, an octogenarian couple, former music teachers, living in happy, companionable retirement. But one day Anne suffers a stroke, perhaps brought on by anxiety due to an attempted break-in at their flat; she declines into dementia, and we follow Georges's increasingly unbearable task of caring for his wife in their apartment – having promised her he would never put her in a home.

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In a recent interview with the BFI's Geoff Andrew, Haneke revealed that the flat in the movie was based on his parents' apartment in Vienna and that he had considered the bleak title The Music Stops – each piece of music in the film is in fact interrupted. Perhaps that is what the end of all our lives will feel like: something switched off before its time and not allowed to reach a vaguely imagined, satisfying "end".

The power and intelligence of this film really is a marvel; it is superbly acted and directed, with the edge of cold steel that audiences have come to expect from Haneke but with something else: a tenderness, gentleness and compassion.