Despite its strengths, a feel-bad film: Amour

It's chance of winning an Oscar for best picture were about the same as my chance of winning the Boston Marathon, but Michael Haneke's Amour is an excellent movie of a certain type, so know what you're in for; it's been widely publicized as a movie about the relationship of an elderly couple, which is true, but generally that calls to mind the sweet and adoring old folks that people many American films. Amour is anything but a feel-good movie, in fact it's kind of a feel-bad movie - Haneke is known for his severity, austerity, and generally dark view of human behavior. Amour is not as harsh as his previous film The White Ribbon, with its brutal and nasty woman-hating protagonist, nor as creepy (nor as dramatic) as Cache, but it's grim in a different way. First of all, this is one of those movies that eschews narrative tension: first scenes shows us the outcome, and then the film steps back and brings us up to that point, so no spoilers possible. We start as police enter a Paris apartment and find elderly woman dead, some kind of assisted suicide it appears, and no sign of her elderly husband. Then we go back a few months, we see the couple, very devoted to each other (Trintignant's tender devotion to his wife may be Haneke's attempt to atone for the bitterness of the male lead in White Ribbon, though whether T's affection is finally truly l'amour or just selfish and expedient is one of the ambiguities hovering still at the end of the film, as in other Haneke works), each slightly eccentric and cranky - what 50+ couple could possibly watch this and not think: that will be us someday? Suddenly, she suffers a transient attack, a stroke it appears, and the rest of the film, essentially, is an intense observation of his increasingly ineffective efforts to care for her. They're a very isolated couple - seeming to have few relations other than with the sharp-edged and sometimes elusive married daughter. The pace is deliberate and careful, some very long takes with almost no sound, no motion even. The scenes of T. helping R. as she learns to walk are painful to watch; one great scene involves T's firing of an incompetent home health aide. Amour - the title is both apt and ironic - is brutal, narrative on the verge of documentary reality, and makes a strong impression on any viewer, but for all its strengths Amour unlikely to be a film on anyone's list of favorites or a film - despite some puzzling aspects at the conclusion, typical of Haneke - that anyone's going to want to see twice.