Rebecca Hall, The Awakening
By Charlie Gray
"Ladybird, ladybird
Fly away home
Your house is on fire
Your children are gone
All except one."
Fly away home
Your house is on fire
Your children are gone
All except one."
Rosamund Pike
Yes, Amour is an unpleasant and uncomfortable film, but that is no reason not to like it. What makes it so good, what makes it deserving of so many awards and honours, is that it tells the simple story of love, death and loss with complete honesty, and without shying away from the heartbreak and the indignity that goes with it. If you’re willing to accept that it won’t make you feel better about dying or losing the ones you love, but rather that it tells the truth about it, then you will realise that you haven’t seen a film as extraordinary as Amour in quite some time.
My humble thoughts on Michael Haneke’s Amour, over on the blog that was in hibernation for eight months (sorry!).
The question then is whether “Amour” is one of those films that one urges everyone to see. I don’t think so. It’s difficult to place it as a product; it’s too troubling and bruising to be a nice night out at the movies. You wouldn’t want to watch it after dinner, nor would you want to go to dinner after watching it. But it is undoubtedly the kind of film that will find its viewers, and that will long continue to trouble them in the right ways. For hours after I saw it and, intermittently, for days afterwards, I could not shake the world and truths it conveyed.
Great review of Michael Haneke’s new, shockingly good film Amour by Teju Cole for The New Yorker. I saw it this afternoon, and I will be writing down my own views over here sometime this week.
- Leonard: Why does someone have to die?
- Virginia: Leonard?
- Leonard: In your book, you said someone had to die.
- Virginia: Hm.
- Leonard: Why?
- Leonard: Is that a stupid question?
- Virginia: No.
- Leonard: I imagine my question's stupid.
- Virginia: Not at all.
- Leonard: Well?
- Virginia: Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. It's contrast.
- Leonard: And who will die? Tell me.
- Virginia: The poet will die. The visionary.
So I saw Cloud Atlas yesterday, and about half-way through, I thought, ‘This Hae-Joo Chang is probably the only Asian man I’ve ever found attractive’.
Only to discover during the end credits that he was in fact played by Jim Sturgess.
…I’m sorry?
“Dear Leonard. To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.”
Virginia Woolf, The last scene of The Hours.
(via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
