Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Amour
2012 · Michael Haneke · Amour on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the concert audience and try to find Georges and Anne. (camera)
Haneke turns the lens on the hall instead of the stage. No reverse shot of the pianist arrives. You hunt through a crowd of strangers for two faces.
Payoff: The film gives you one job in its first minutes: look, and accept that looking is all you can do. In the reading: pure optical & sound situations. This is what the reading calls a pure optical situation: you see, and nothing you see can be acted on.
Look at how many shots put a doorway between you and them. (staging)
Khondji keeps the camera locked and lets corridors, door frames, and room geometry hold the couple. You learn the apartment's layout, which room gives onto which, and then you feel it close in.
Payoff: The apartment measures their world. As Anne's range shrinks, the number of rooms the film uses shrinks with it.
Listen to what fills the room when the piano stops. (sound)
There is no score. The only music is Schubert and Beethoven played inside the story. Once it stops you get clocks, water, footsteps, breath, and the effortful sounds of a failing body.
Payoff: Nothing tells you how to feel. Whatever you feel here is yours, unmanufactured.
Watch how little Trintignant's face moves while he listens. (performance)
Haneke keeps Georges in a locked frame at a respectful distance. Devotion and exhaustion sit in the same set of the mouth and eyes, and the film never lets the feeling discharge into action.
Payoff: A face that registers everything and can fix nothing is the film's actual subject. In the reading: icon of quality. Trintignant's still face is what the reading calls a qualisign: an image holding one feeling with nowhere to put it.
Time one scene of washing, feeding, or lifting from start to finish. (cutting)
Haneke plays the labor of care close to real time. No cut spares you the lifting of a slack body from chair to bed, and no music hurries it along.
Payoff: Illness is mostly made of these minutes. Most films cut them out, so you never learn what the time feels like. In the reading: temps mort. These stretches are what the reading calls dead time: minutes that carry no plot because the plot has stopped.
Once you have seen it
Watch the opening sequence again before anything else. (structure)
Haneke opens with the apartment broken into and Anne laid out among flowers. Everything after it is a return to a fate you have already been shown.
Payoff: Suspense is removed on purpose. What is left is the duration of how, which is the only thing Haneke wants you to sit with.
Notice where scenes stop before they finish. (cutting)
Monika Willi and Nadine Muse cut out the connective tissue. A scene ends before resolution and the next one opens after some new worsening you were never shown.
Payoff: Decline arrives as stations rather than a slide. The film makes you assemble the worst parts yourself.
Look at the pigeon and at the photo albums. (setting)
A bird strays in from the light-well. Georges turns pages of pictures. Puzos filled these rooms with a cultivated life: grand piano, crowded shelves, paintings, worn furniture, all of it outlasting its use.
Payoff: Objects carry the couple's whole history. A lifetime of art sits in the room and protects nobody in it.
Carry this in: Watch the apartment shrink. Count the rooms the film still uses as Anne's range narrows.