Amour

I found it rather ironic that a trailer for Safe Haven, (Nicholas Sparks’ latest atrocity) played as a trailer before Amour. Nick Sparks has for changed the romantic genre for the worse. His highly formulaic and pandering films obfuscate the definition of love by equating it to fresh young bodies, sensationalization of romantic gestures, and exploitation of traumatic events.

Which brings us to Amour, the complete antithesis of the trailer that preceded it. Amour chronicles the aging couple George (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Three Colors: Red) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva, Three Colors: White). When Anne is left partially paralyzed and restrained to a wheelchair, George takes it upon himself take care of Anne, despite the strains it puts upon himself.

While the premise sounds rather cheesy and over sentimental, it is anything but. Michael Haenke (White Ribbon, Cache) grounds his film in honest realism yet remains poetic through it’s dashes of magical realism. The few deviations from reality act to amplify the raw, human emotions of the film and potently punctuate the thoughts scribed by the narrative.

Amour explores the delicate relationship between love and responsibility and demonstrates that even the most harmonious couple can be pushed to friction and frustration. This theme is perfectly translated through Haenke’s bold and incendiary cinematography. Most of the film is shot through a static camera; simply framing a close-up or medium shot and leaving the camera to linger. Although at times we feel invited into their cozy home, we then feel uncomfortably intrusive to their degraded lives.

Haenke is absolutely unflinching in his treatment, creating a suffocating ambiance as we are forced to face our mortality. We are completely tied to the film because of the two leads. Trintignant and Riva have outstanding chemistry, able to write the couple’s life history through subtle body language and suggestion alone. We can easily believe the deep bond their relationship has formed, making it so much more tragic to see their lives hang on by the thread that is love.

Unlike Nick Sparks’ convention, Haenke does not insult his audience with such mundane definitions of love. He knows that we clash with everyday life and the results are less than ideal and difficult to negotiate with. He knows that commitment and unconditional love aren’t enough to pardon us from death, but serve merely as a guiding light as we face the spectre of our judgement. And he knows how to render these complexities, forcing us to question our own preconceived notions. So no Nick Sparks, taking your shirt off in the rain isn’t a proper definition of love. Amour is.       

Anna Karenina

Joe Wright has been a young and exciting auteur, rising through the ranks and leaving his stamp on modern film.  With the success of his breakthrough adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, he extended his success through his bold and beautiful adaptation of Atonement garnering him garnering him a Golden Globe nomination for best director.  Straying from novel adaptations, Wright showed his range with his 2011 Hanna, a live-wire and electronic reinvention of a fairy tale.  

Wright draws on extremely poetic aesthetics in his films; with vibrant mise-en-scene married with emotionally symphonic scores.  Wright returns to his novel adaptations with his take on Anna Karenina.  Tolstoy’s masterwork weaves the tale of love, adultery, and classism in imperial Russia, focusing in on the titular Anna (Keira Knightley, Pride and Prejudice, Never Let Me Go) and her struggles with her sanity and social scrutiny in the wake of her affair with Count Alexi Vronsky (Aaron Taylor Johnson, Nowhere Boy, Kick-Ass).

Immediately, you’ll notice that the film is shot on a theatrical stage, setting an operatic canvas for the film. The kinetic movement of the shifting set is perfectly coupled with the dazzling costumes, making for a stunning collage of visual figurines and bright set pieces.

The visual aspects of the film are only matched by Dario Marianelli’s enchanting score.  Already capturing an Oscar for his work in Atonement, Marianelli’s soundtrack is able to captures both seductive allure and insufferable shame involved in forbidden love.

Wright’s production is a modern ballet, brimming immersive dance sequences and tragically beautiful set pieces.  However, beautifully flawed is the best we can afford to Anna Karenina.

While we see strong performances from the entire cast, the film is unable to find a proper tempo to keep up with such long and heavy source material.  The first half of Anna Karenina depicts Count Vronsky courting Lady Karenina, and adheres to the theatrical vision, giving the film a rolling cadence.  However, the second half of the movie starts to abandon this style, making for a more disjointed narrative.

As Wright begins to examine Anna’s psychosis and paranoia, the film’s tempo comes to a halt.  The narrative becomes slightly aimless and repetitive, reducing the potency Anna and Alexei’s increasingly strained relationship.  The film becomes too messy to be unable to sustain the substance of the great Russian novel.

Joe Wright has never shied away from the bold and the beautiful, taking classic works and sculpting them into works worthy of the modern canon.  However with Karenina, he may have finally bit off more than he could chew. How tragic.