Sadness, My Sin

Do you know a girl named Sadness?
Do you know her well?
Does she dine with you on Sundays?
Or send postcards where you dwell?

And how well do you know Sadness?
Does she of marital miseries tell?
Were you there when her son first spoke?
Did you teach that vagrant to spell?

Did you lie in her quiet embrace?
Did you whisper love in her ear?
Did she tell you that she loved you?
And leave when the morrow drew near?

You hear now she loves someone else.
You realize it’s been a while.
You say, “I’m with Elation now.”
But you miss her kitten smile.

And Elation, she’s impatient.
She won’t let you be.
She wants you to jump and laugh and dance and sing,
And say, “I’m in love with me!”

THE STATION AGENT (2003)

RATING: - 9/10. 

 What is it about Peter Dinklage that makes him so irresistible to watch? He’s handsome, certainly. And the fact that he’s a few inches short of four and a half feet must have something to do with it. But there’s more to his screen persona than just his height and his looks. For one thing, he has a honeyed baritone voice to kill for. But he has an aura, more than anything—an aura born of acceptance of his own un-ordinariness, perhaps. He is so used to being stared and gawked at, wherever he goes, day in and day out, that being in front of a camera and having his image projected on a giant screen to be watched by hundreds of people comes naturally to him; his life is already a peepshow for most people he meets. THE STATION AGENT is a heartbreakingly beautiful film, made all the more attractive by the presence of this unheralded star of the silver screen. 

The film is about an extremely introverted train aficionado called Finbar McBride (Fin to everyone), played with sublime grace by Dinklage, whose hermetic lifestyle constructing models of trains in a Hoboken hobby shop owned by who seems like his only friend in the world, the similarly quiet and sober Henry Styles, goes woefully awry when Henry dies, leaving Fin a little rural land in Newfoundland, New Jersey, with an abandoned train depot on it. Fin may have found his paradise. He has a problem dealing with people and for good reason; more often than not, he’s treated as a freak, a walking-talking cartoon, a grotesque caricature to be gawked at and insulted. He finds it better to just stay with his train models, walking the “right of way” (which means walking along an abandoned rail line), watching his movies of trains chugging by, smoke billowing from their tops. He has given up on the world. 

What he doesn’t count on his talkative, relentlessly upbeat neighbor Joe Oramas (a bravura turn by TV regular Bobby Cannavale) who runs his dad’s hot-dog/coffee trailer near Fin’s train depot. Although Fin is completely unresponsive to the perky but lonely Joe’s efforts at forging a friendship, gradually Fin begins to acquiesce to his advances, letting Joe come on his railroad walks, having lunches with him, telling him about trains. Their friendship is painted with wonderful acuity of observation and humor and is a sublime joy to watch. For example, during smoking a joint together, here’s a piece of their conversation.
Joe: -Trains are really cool.

Fin: -So are horses.

Joe (confused): -What?

Fin (dazed): -I was just thinking that.

Joe: -Gimme the joint, man.

Joe slowly brings Fin out of his shell, making him think that maybe a few human relationships might not be such a bad idea. Fin also meets an attractive, troubled woman Olivia Harris (played with grace and insight by Patricia Clarkson) who has moved to the quiet little town because of her son’s death. Director Tom McCarthy deserves a truckload of credit for not assuming immediately (like most filmmakers do) that since these two characters have developed a connect and are both romantically available, they MUST end up together by the end of the film. This film is much more subtle than this; we get the feeling that since Olivia’s son and Fin are about the same size, part of Fin’s appeal to Olivia is because she can almost believe it is her son she is seeing when she looks at Fin. McCarthy does not feel the need to bombard us with explanations. He is content to let us into the lives of these desperately lonely characters, all of them hurting in their own way, looking for some companionship, perhaps a “witness to their lives”.

This is a movie that seems to speak of a lived-in life, so to say. The humor in the film rings of real-world laughs. Y'know the sort of laughter that comes with a friend having trouble tearing off a tough piece of meat, or a shared inside joke about a certain character trait of someone you know well. There are no grand set-pieces here, just people going on about their ordinary lives. This is what the cinema is all about, at least to me: life through a different lens. The characters in the film do not believe their lives are special, but we, as viewers, can look at them from a distance and see the poetry and the beauty hidden behind the commonplace mundane details of their everyday existence.

In a film like this, the responsibility on the actors is enormous. There are no spectacular CGI effects to detract us from the human story. Clarkson, Dinklage and Cannavale are all wonderful in their respective roles. Clarkson brings a pathos and a deep, inconsolable sadness to her role and yet keeps Olivia from becoming emo or gratingly depressive. Cannavale is the life and soul of the film, with his irrepressible buoyancy and infectious zeal for life. We feel that both Fin and Olivia like him because they both want to be as happy as he is and hope some of his enthusiasm for life might just rub off on them (which it does, actually). But the star of the film is Peter Dinklage. This is a character as far removed from Dinklage’s star-making turn as the Machiavellian Tyrion Lannister in the HBO original series GAME OF THRONES as possible. THE STATION AGENT gave Dinklage his breakthrough and we can see why. He radiates enough screen presence to make most stars of the Golden Hollywood era cry with envy, executing every nuance, every movement with skill and a thorough understanding of his character. It was said of Heath Ledger’s performance in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN that he did not just know how Ennis talked, but even how he breathed. The same can be said of this wonderful, wonderful performance. When he gets up on a table in the bar he avoids throughout the film, and in a drunken haze of pain, frustration and betrayal, shouts, “HERE I AM! TAKE A LOOK!” we see his intense vulnerability. For the first time in his film, he opened up to someone and all he gets is pain for it. Maybe his cocoon of banishment was better.

A fantastic dramedy, one of the best Sundance features of the last 10 years, a superbly observed and executed character study, helmed by an immensely talented director and given wings to fly by his mercurial star. 9/10.

ANIMAL KINGDOM (2012)

Gangster movies have to walk a tight line. Like in all films, our protagonists must be people we can root for, people who should be able to get away with whatever they did by the end, and we, as an audience, would be okay with it. But unlike crime capers like OCEAN’S ELEVEN, the characters have to be frightening. Disney-fication of the hard edges of crime cannot be allowed and the consequences of criminality cannot be watered down or smoothed over. The solution to this quandary is usually to give us one character who will be our entry-way, either because he’s relatively non-threatening and is not a hardened criminal yet, and put him in a world which has no place for anyone who is NOT a robber, murderer, kidnapper or racketeer, and by gradually bringing us into this world, exposes the relative sanity behind the shootouts, the drugs and the self-destructiveness. It gives us family breakfasts and character singularities and bar-room confessions to humanize otherwise inscrutable psychopaths. It makes us empathize. This is what made Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola so good at this genre. They understood. They realized what made these people tick, what they were like with their wives and parents and children and friends. They knew what made them shoot a person in cold blood. And this is where so many film-makers go wrong, ruining the delicate balance of emotions that characterize any good gangster film. Why would any film-maker want to undertake such a risky genre at all? Because you get to explore the trappings of conventional legal society, the amorality of a flashy charismatic powerful set of people and because it’s so fucking delicious. And now comes another director to join the Gangster Movie Hall of Fame—David Michod. 

 

ANIMAL KINGDOM reminded me of THE DEPARTED in more ways than one—not for the plot (the two plotlines have almost nothing in common), but because of its pulsing, throbbing energy, its magnetic dizzying musical score and by its insightful analysis of guilt, loyalty and life outside the law. The film takes us into an Australian crime family, the Codys, ruled with a delicate powdered iron hand by the matriarch Janine “Smurf” Cody (played with grey-eyed venom by Aussie powerhouse 

Jackie Weaver). The family consists of Smurf and her three sons—the eldest Andrew “Pope” Cody (Ben Mendelsohn, in the form of his life) is a notorious, psychopathic armed robber on the run from the police, the middle son Craig (a rightfully twitchy and believable Sullivan Stapleton) is a volatile drug dealer constantly on edge from ingesting large quantities of his own product and the youngest Darren (THE MUMMY alumnus Luke Ford) is still in his early twenties, looking up to his brothers for inspiration but frightened by the implications of their actions. Also included unofficially is Barry “Baz” Brown (Joel Edgerton in a maverick cameo), the best friend and partner-in-crime of Pope Cody. The family is tightly controlled by the deceptively effeminate Smurf Cody, who exacts long kisses from each of her sons as a gesture of obeisance, in a subliminal attempt to assert who’s boss. The whole family is living in constant fear of the loose-cannon Armed Robbery Squad, who have developed a fetish for “encounter killings” of major players in the Melbourne bank robbery scene. Into this tinderbox of a situation is thrown in Joshua “J” Cody (an intensely vulnerable performance from newcomer James Frecheville), the son of Smurf’s estranged daughter. When J’s mother dies after OD-ing on heroin, Smurf happily takes in the 17 year-old. On the other end of the spectrum is Nathan Leckie (played with the ease of a maestro by Guy Pearce), one of the few honest police officers in the Armed Robbery Squad. Throughout the film, Leckie and Smurf are locked in an intense cat-and-mouse game.

What is most frightening about this film is how in the face of such madness, J seems to think he’s living a reasonably sane life. As he says, “All this seemed strange to me and not strange either. Kids just are wherever they are and just doing whatever they’re doing, y’know?” In a situation like this, anybody can kill. A gun thrown into the hands of a seventeen year-old from a more-or-less parentless home and in the care of a crime family—how does he know not to shoot? The movie doesn’t let us be passive spectators looking on at the proceedings from a distance. We smell the blood, the shattered glass, the broken bones, the cold metal of a loaded gun. We’re constantly thrown into the shoes of J, and there is no escape from the knotty questions the film asks. This is a movie with free will—anything can (and does) happen right around the corner.

And yet David Michod is not here to judge. His lens is an objective one. Save for the terrifying 

brutality of Pope Cody, he chooses to show things as they are and let his audience decide about the good guys and the bad. He is a talent to be reckoned with, a magnificent gift to world cinema, courtesy of the Australian film industry. With vivid visual flair, virtually inexhaustible stores of empathy and a fantastic gift for finding the perfect synthesis of music and image, Michod has all the skills to make a great director. He makes sure that his viewers are always aware of the danger his characters are in, never letting the pace slacken, bringing on scene after gripping scene. Antony Partos’ moody, ominous electronic musical score accentuates every moment of the film with its seductive dark grooves. This is one of the best background scores I’ve seen in any crime movie, contributing hugely to the effectiveness of the film.

A near-flawless thriller and a masterful study of the criminal psyche from a debut director who shows oodles of promise; THIS is what Sundance is all about. A fantastic 9/10 for me.

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (2012)

With the release of THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING in 2001, Peter Jackson gave birth to a cinematic cult that has had few equals in the history of movies. Taking a much-revered fantasy opus, Jackson wove magic out of his frames, bringing Middle-Earth to startling life on the big screen. Gandalf, Frodo, Aragorn, Gollum and Sauron were soon to become household names, a feat which Tolkien’s book alone never could have achieved. LOTR brought fantasy-geekdom into the mainstream, while at the same time, bringing in billions of dollars for the producers. With the spectacular end to the trilogy in the form of THE RETURN OF THE KING in 2003, it was only a matter of time before the franchise was restarted. But if THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY is any indication of what is to come for this once-illustrious franchise, I am scared. Scared because this Peter Jackson is tired. Far too tired to create anything of worth. 

I am a diehard LOTR fan, like many people who have watched the movie or/and read the book. I was perfectly prepared to be blown away by an epic tale of loyalty, belonging, heroism and Ian McKellen talking through a huge beard. What I got was an overlong movie which never even takes its own themes or characters seriously enough to make us care about them. The film is basically a collection of vignettes where a bunch of near-helpless, but exceptionally arrogant dwarves (who look far taller here than they have ever been in any movie I have seen) stumble around Middle Earth trying to go to their lost kingdom of ... something Lonely Mountain whatever, while Gandalf leaves them at periodic intervals only to come back just as they are about to be eaten/torn apart/impaled/incinerated and saves them all with a burst of white light. I tell you, the Balrog would fancy his chances of “pass”-ing against this Gandalf. I ruefully remembered the euphoric appeal of Gandalf’s appearance on a cliff at sunrise at the Battle of Helm’s Deep with the Eorlingas, just as Gondor was about to fall. Now, that was a Gandalf we all admired. When that Gandalf spoke of a “dark evil” spreading across the land, shivers went up your spine. This Gandalf is so much of a juvenile nincompoop that not even his dwarf fellowship members give his magical power much credit. I cannot forgive Peter Jackson for ruining Gandalf for me. And that is not the only sin of the film.

  AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY did not work for me, for a variety of reasons. The lack of any imposing villains being prime among them. Although I have immense faith in Benedict Cumberbatch who is to play Smaug the dragon in this trilogy, he was nowhere to be seen throughout the duration of the film. But then again, we rarely saw Sauron throughout the entire LOTR trilogy too. But that didn’t stop the audience from fearing the malevolent Eye of Sauron. In the meanwhie, the Ringwraiths and Saruman served as excellent substitute villains. No such luck here. Here we have a laughable tubby little Goblin King, three stupid trolls and a pale Orc who seems to love saying “dwarf-scum” in Orkish. Another problem with the film is that its situations and events have no depth or heft. When Frodo and the Fellowship set out to throw the One Ring into Mount Doom, we were aware of the consequences of what they were doing. It was a heroic journey, a quest in the truest sense of the term. It drove the film and gave it a purpose. Here, a bunch of greedy dwarves set out to recover the gold the bad dragon stole from them. The climax of AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY takes place on a cliff-edge where the majority of the protagonists are stuck in a tree which is steadily tipping over the edge of the cliff, which reminded me of similar situations in ludicrous Bollywood movies like RAJU CHACHA and WELCOME. There is not one scene in this pathetic bore of a film that matches the ferocious battle at the watch-tower of Amon Sul, or the grandeur of the statues of Parth Galen, or the showdown between Arwen and the Nazgul at the Fords of Bruinen. 

 The film perks up once Gollum enters, but well, that’s just for about one scene. Andy Serkis’ genius shines through in his limited screen time though.Martin Freeman too, does the best he can with his shoddy material. The cinematography and locations are top-notch as usual, but there may be one shot too many of a small line of dwarves and ponies on a snow-covered mountain. Indeed, the technical aspects of the film are as good as one can expect from a Peter Jackson film, but this visual magnificence is hardly used at the service of plot and characterization.

A badly-made fantasy sleepathon from a franchise and a director from whom we have come to expect great things. Terribly disappointing. 4/10.

 

DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012)

Quentin Tarantino’s a rambunctious soul, ain’t he? King Quentin's brand of social humanist cinema might have a few too many gratuitous buckets of blood to satisfy puritans of the genre, but it has its (vengeful) heart in the right place. With the highs he achieved with his Nazi-scalping, milk-drinking, postmodernist potshot-taking at the Third Reich INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, it was obvious that DJANGO UNCHAINED would arrive, surrounded by tremendous hype and would have face up to high expectations. To a large extent, it does not disappoint.
 

The story is a freewheeling Spaghetti Southern, telling the story of a black slave Django (the D is silent) (Jamie Foxx) who is recruited (in typical bloody Tarantino style) by a dentist-turned-bounty hunter Dr King Schultz (a magnificent Christoph “May I have a glass of your delicious milk?” Waltz) to find and kill the three Brittle brothers, wanted by the state for a murder. The Brittle brothers and Django (the D is silent) have a history, which involves Django’s attempt to run away with his wife Bromhilda von Shaft (don’t ask) from their previous master. Now Django has a chance at bloody vengeance, that too, backed by the law. As he says, “Killing white folks and they pay you for it… what’s not to like?” The story takes a turn around the halfway mark to finding Bromhilda, or Hildy as Django calls her, and going all the way to the estate of a demented Francophile slave-owner named Calvin Candie (Leo DiCaprio, having the time of his life) under the pretense of buying Mandingo slavefighters. The trajectory of the story, like in all QT films, is complex and is best not explained here. It’s not my fault that you’re scratching your head at this point.

The film is a veritable storehouse of flawless individual moments and scenes which can be rewatched time and again. From the Ku Klux Klan segment about misshapen masks to the dinner table scene where Calvin Candie goes just a teeny weeny bit crazy when he realises he’s being made a fool of to the hyper-realistic flashback scene where Django and Hildy’s escape attempt is chronicled to the throbbing beats of Anthony Hamilton’s FREEDOM. The scene where Schultz is aiming at Ellis Brittle from a long distance on the directions of Django is a terrific example of the feel of this film.

Schultz: - You sure that’s him?

Django: - Yeah.

Schultz: - Positive?

Django: - I don’t know.

Schultz: - You don’t know if you’re positive?

Django: - I don’t know what “positive” mean.

Schultz: - Means you’re sure.

Django: - Yes.

Schultz : - Yes what?

Django :  - Yes, I’m sure that’s Ellis Brittle. (Schultz shoots Ellis) I’m positive he dead.

Tarantino shows all of his flair at creating labyrinthine dialogue that seem to ultimately snake and twist their way into ferocious bloodbaths. The film is closer to the sudden-zooming, fast-cutting, restless camera visual flourish of the KILL BILL movies than the laidback conversational setpieces of PULP FICTION, and is all the more dynamic for it. Say what you will about QT and his fetishes for everything from food to foot and his stubborn refusal to sober up and his relentless fascination for the most cliché-ridden forms of cult cinema, the man will draw your eyeballs to his film and he will not let go.

The film benefits from two sublime performances, from Christoph Waltz and Leo DiCaprio. Waltz’s character, in particular, is crucial to the film’s structure. He is the one character we are supposed to sympathise and empathise with, even more so than the acerbic angry young man Django. King Schultz is our entry-point, the amoral liberal-minded bounty hunter, somewhere between the amoral psychotic Calvin Candie and the amoral killing machine Django. DiCaprio is given a different directive—go crazy and give the audience something to gawp at. After a long string of hard-hitting realistic thematically mature characters in films ranging from BLOOD DIAMOND to INCEPTION, as well as being Martin Scorsese’s resident muse in THE DEPARTED, THE AVIATOR and SHUTTER ISLAND, here he takes a welcome break and just has a killer time, taking us on a thrill-ride of pipe-chomping brutality.

The problem with DJANGO UNCHAINED starts somewhere near the end of the film. Tarantino seemed to be having too much of a good time on the sets of the film and didn’t know when to stop. If the film had ended with Django and Hildy walking off into the sunset right after the post-purchase bloodbath, it would have been a far better film. Instead, QT adds in a cameo for himself and inserts a needless continuance of gratuitous violence, breaking the rhythm of the film. Many of the scenes at Candieland could also have been chopped off quite a bit. Sharper editing scissors would have made this film much better than it is. Beyond the problems with the length of the film, the film suffers from lack of development of the romance between Django and Hildy. QT has never been very good at romance and romantic subplots are always at the periphery of his films. Therefore it’s a problem in DJANGO UNCHAINED that the love story is so important to the development of the film’s story. Quentin probably realised this, which is why he gives us the Schultz-Django bromance to compensate.

An unrestrained, sexy second chapter of History Rewritten by Quentin Tarantino that will delight all of his fans and leave the rest stunned by what they’ve just seen. 8/10.

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (2012)

Romcom is such a done-to-death genre. A director would have to be crazy to do it. He’d have to be crazier still to make a romcom about a crazy guy. And he’d  have to be batshit crazy to make a romcom where if you look closely, just about every character is a nutjob. David. O Russell is just that kind of crazy. Oh and yeah, he’s also a fucking genius. SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK is the best comedy I saw in 2012 and one of the best romcoms I have seen in quite some time, a fluid effortless entertainer, a glorious throwback to the days when good romantic movies ended with dance competitions and confessions of love everlasting. Y’know, before the indie hipsters took it over, the self-conscious arty bastards.

Bradley Cooper stars as Pat Solitano, Jr., a teacher with bipolar disorder who’s spent the eight months prior to the film’s beginning in a mental asylum, for nearly beating his wife’s lover to death in a fit of rage. Explosions of rage are not an anomaly in their family. His father, Pat Sr. (Robert DeNiro in sublime form), is banned from attending any Philadelphia Eagles rugby games because of too many brawls at matches. Now, Pat Sr has lost his job and makes a living from sports betting, which involves him sitting for hours on end in front of the television, transfixed by his many superstitions and obsessions. Pat Jr’s mother Dolores (played by Australian actress Jacki Weaver) has come to terms with the fact that the men in her family are not entirely mentally stable. She tries to watch out for them, does her best to protect them from themselves. Doesn’t always work.

After getting out of the asylum, Pat is obsessed with getting back with his wife Nikki. He starts reading books that Nikki teaches in her high school, he starts a workout regimen, he starts going to therapy sessions with his court-ordered shrink Cliff Patel (Anupam Kher in a restrained tasteful performance). During the course of this self-improvement odyssey, he meets a mysterious, attractive woman Tiffany Maxwell (Jennifer Lawrence), his best friend’s sister-in-law. Tiffany has problems of her own. After her policeman husband Tommy died, she had sex with eleven people in her office and subsequently got fired. Tiffany and Pat share an electric chemistry the likes of which I have rarely seen. They have a scene in a diner where they discuss a sexual fantasy involving an older woman, which had my jaw on the floor. A romcom makes or breaks on the strength of its lead pair, and on that criterion, SLP ranks alongside the classics of the genre like ANNIE HALL and WHEN HARRY MET SALLY….

David O. Russell’s approach to all the crazy in the movie’s screenplay is to be crazy himself. Many of the scenes in the Solitano house are filled with people all talking simultaneously and Russell uses a very uncoventional shooting style to accommodate them all. He speeds up some frames, the edits come fast and hard, basically just letting the camera go where it will. There’s a shot in the film near the end when Pat and Tiffany kiss and the camera zooms back, rather than zooming in as if often done during climactic moments of romantic catharsis. I have seen shots like this before, even in another Bradley Cooper film LIMITLESS (2011), but I never have any idea how it’s achieved. The effect, needless to say, is breathtaking.

The acting in the film is top-notch. Bradley Cooper improves with every film he does, laying in this film a firm claim to be Hollywood’s biggest young star. Pat’s approach to the sharp uncomfortable edges of life is to pretend that they are insignificant and that life always turns out for the best. He is so enamoured of the idea of silver linings that he cannot accept that sometimes they just don’t exist. Cooper’s performance is one of quiet desperation, emotional vulnerability and a volatility that often comes to the fore when he hears Stevie Wonder’s My Cherie Amour. As for Jennifer Lawrence, I need to get something off my chest. Oooooh mama. She plays Tiffany as a seductive goth who, despite being nearly as fucked up as Pat, is more comfortable with who she is. At just twenty-two, she looks much older and shows incredible promise. I was amazed by her gutsy turn in WINTER’S BONE and she continues her fluent form here too. Robert DeNiro stuns as an obsessive-compulsive father who struggles to realise that his son is more like him than he’d like. This is one of his best performances in a long time and shows all of the range and ability of this legend of the silver screen. Jacki Weaver too is effective as Dolores Solitano, the glue that holds the family together.

 SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK is the feel-good movie of 2012, a sweet, funny, insightful journey into the mysteries of love and the craziness that follows. Must-watch for any fans of the romcom genre. 8.5/10.

AMOUR (2012)

Life is naught but complicated choices but Love conquers all. This might be the tagline of Michael Haneke's AMOUR. Does this seem like the tagline of a happy film to you, one that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside? I mean, just how hard-hitting can a film called LOVE be? Doesn't Love, in fact, conquer all? Aren't the lovers supposed to live their happily ever afters together? That's the thing, see, Anne and Georges Laurent have already lived their happily ever after together. This is the story of what happens later. Does it have the obligatory happy (or at least hopeful) ending of all films dealing with love? I am not sure. Maybe it does. I have seen it twice now. I am still not entirely sure what I saw.

Michael Haneke serves up a bruising stunner of a film in AMOUR, his 2012 Cannes Palme D’or winner about an octogenarian couple Anne and Georges Laurent (played by Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignante), and how they deal with Anne’s deteriorating health after she suffers a stroke. This is a magnificent film from a director at the peak of his form, displaying not just technical prowess, but an abundance of restraint, empathy, a thorough insight of his material and a boundless courage to follow his story to its frightening logical conclusion. This is a film of unadulterated brutality, not inflicted by one person on another, but of circumstances on our protagonists. All love stories need an ending; the film’s unique ability is to make us care about the love that Georges and Anne have for each other, even though we only see the dying last throes of this great romance.

This could have been a soulless, disturbing film. The reason it is instead an involving tour de force of life, death and everything in between, is Haneke’s humanism. He makes unconventional choices throughout the film. In one scene, he shoots Isabelle Huppert (playing Eva, the rather estranged daughter of Anne and Georges) and Trintignante talking about Riva's stroke for the first time, and we cannot see Trintignante's face at all throughout his monologue. Perhaps this is right-- this is a film which looks unflinchingly at life, and demonstrates a stout refusal to burst into hysterics or melodrama. Would the scene have benefited if Trintignante's enormously expressive face was on screen for the whole time, so that we as viewers, have a compass to guide us as to how WE should feel? I don't think so. The emotions are powerful enough to be let loose on screen without amplification. The audience will feel what the director intended them to feel without any guidance or direction.

The film may appear long-winded and pretentious, especially in long scenes where nothing much happens and the camera stays static and at a distance from the proceedings. But this is Haneke's directorial vision--- of allowing us to be invisible voyeurs in the little details of the lives of these two people. Every scene in the film is to a certain end and is not arbitrarily thrown in at a whim. Take, for instance, the breakfast Anne and Georges are having together after Anne’s first stroke, and Georges tells her about a deeply emotional experience he had at the movies when he was younger. A short, simple scene, two people engaging in what would seem to be rather mundane conversation, considering that these are movie characters who are always expected to wow us with their grasp of repartee. But the fact that this is a couple still very much in love with each other, still mesmerized by each other, both according each other the respect they deserve, comes through magnificently in their dialogue.

Anne: - That's sweet. Why have you never told me this?

Georges: -There are still many stories I've never told you.

Anne: -Don't tell me you're going to ruin your image in your old age?

Georges: -You bet I won't. But what is my image?

Anne: -Sometimes you're a monster. But you're nice.

Georges: - (smiling) Can I get you another drink? (Anne bursts out laughing)

A lot of the credit for making the characters come alive goes to the two wonderful leads, Emmanuelle Riva (this year’s fore-runner for the Best Actress Oscar) and Jean-Louis Trintignante, two veterans of French cinema, bringing a lifetime of experience to draw out their characters in full-bodied glorious form. These are performances rich in detail, powerful in their concision and ringing with truth, accepting the terrible messiness of life and the even messier business of slow death. 

A near-flawless ode to love, a touching movie made with warmth and courage. 9/10 for me.