I watched Amour (Love) yesterday morning at the Cannes Film Festival, though an eight am screening every seat of the massive Palais auditorium was filled, expectation was so high that I found it impossible to get a ticket for the evening screening. It was the hottest ticket of the festival so far. For those that love Haneke's style of filmmaking, this film will not disappoint, the camera never moves, locked tripod mounted shots roll for several minutes whilst characters walk in and out of frame, action takes place often off camera, this all forces the viewer to concentrate more, in a similar way to Hidden we look around the screen searching for meaning and intent. All the three main performances were realistic, believable, exceptional, the son and all other characters appear only in one scene. Was this a great film, sadly no. Though the run time was just over two hours, in my opinion time was squandered on needlessly long running locked camera scenes with little or no action or meaning communicated whatsoever, again on a slow montage sequence of the rooms of the couples paintings in their residence, a similar one of the empty rooms of their flat at night, a view of an audience sitting down and the preparations till a musical recital to begin, all simply wasted so much time that could have been much better filled with more narrative and dramatic sequences that could have fleshed out the spartan build up the dramatic final scenes, given them more foundation and depth, this left me both disappointed and unsatisfied. For example, a sudden violent reaction seemed brutal and completely unjustified in reaction to an act of passive defiance, I understand that every member of the audience is capable and willing to fill in the missing scenes but Haneke one again does not even attempt to portray a satisfying narrative, so the violent act seems therefore completely out of character, simply because no effort had been made to show a dramatic build up to justify such a savage reaction, I was shocked for all the wrong reasons, rather than empathise with a person acting out of character through despair after their love had eroded after long period of time, I instead found myself initially reading the violent act at mean and cruel (I'm sure this wasn't the intent). This was simply clumsy and completely unnecessary given the time that could been used more productively, time was repeatedly squandered wastefully on slow shots previously giving little or nothing in the way of information, simply poor story telling from someone fully capable of doing so much more. Therefore the result...no White Ribbon, probably my least favourite of his films so far, a big disappointment and a missed opportunity, wonderful actors, totally relevant subject matter, though poorly handled.
