Heaven does not come after life; it is found in life
Michael Haneke’s film, “Amour,” follows the final stage in
the lives of Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and George (Jean-Louis Trintignant). In a
reversal of expected cultural norms, it is the elderly husband here who takes
care of his dying wife. This reversal prepares us for a profoundly different
kind of reversal—in which the conclusion of these two lives leaves us with a
startling, if ancient, understanding of death, and life.
Over the course of the film Anne suffers first a brief and
temporary mental fermata, then a paralyzing stroke, and then a second stroke
that leaves her unable to communicate or to take care of her most basic needs.
Human dignity slips away from her. Between the first and second stroke she
makes George promise not to take her back to the hospital. She does not want to
outlive her ability to take care of herself. George reluctantly promises while at
the same time showing her, and us, how painful it will be not to give her every
possible measure of care, how devastating it will be to lose her. In the end,
he keeps his painful promise.
The other important character in the film is their daughter,
Eva (“life”), played by Isabelle Huppert. Eva is as devoted to herself as
George is to Anne—possibly signaling a failure of the parents to provide her
with the same consistent love they have for each other. Whatever the reason,
Eve is an infrequent visitor to her parents’ apartment and when she does come
it is unpleasant. Two of her visits focus on her criticism of her father for
not taking proper care of her mother by putting her in a nursing
home—projecting onto George her own repressed guilt for neglect. Another visit
has Eve rambling insensitively to her suffering mother about how she and her
sometimes present husband Geoff don’t have enough money to buy a home due to
recent bad investments. Anne struggles to speak some response but is unable to
be intelligible. Her heroic efforts at speech form a stark contrast with her
daughter’s waste of words.
We typically equate love with passion. Passionate love
involves a giving and a receiving that elevates life. In this film Haneke shows
that love transcends emotion. Every challenge that George faces he faces with
equanimity. He never panics; he always reacts with a steady hand. And, most
importantly, he is always there for Anne. George finds not only love in his
relationship with Anne (and she with him); he finds redemption.
And this vision of redemption is the ultimate idea the film
paints for us. Anne’s final agonizing pain brings forth George’s earlier silent
promise to fulfill his obligation to her. His last act of love is to cover her
face with the marital pillow and bring her suffering to an end.
But George’s obligation to care for his wife is the source
of meaning in his life. With Anne gone, George’s life is effectively over, too.
He puts a lovely dress on Anne, surrounds her head on the bed with petals as on
a bier, seals the apartment with tape, and leaves us to assume that he then
turns on the gas.
In the next scene George, lying on his bed in a separate
room, hears dishes rattling. He gets up, confused, and shuffles into the
kitchen to see what is causing the noise. There he finds Anne, washing the
dishes as he, George, had most recently done after Eve and Geoff’s last visit.
Anne says something to him about putting on his shoes. He does, she finishes
what she is doing, and puts on her coat for what may be the routine after-dinner
walk they must have enjoyed before her illness. Still confused (he has only
just arrived in heaven while she has had an hour or so to orient herself)
George follows her towards the door. She has to remind him to put on his coat.
It is the most prosaic scene in the film. Heaven is just that; it is the
quotidian life we live in relationship to the person we most love.
Making dinner, doing the dishes, going for a walk… these
small acts of sharing are what delineate a redeemed life—a life that, if we are
lucky enough, is punctuated by high moments of passion and excitement but
which, for anyone, can be, during all of those in between stretches of time, a
life redeemed. Haneke is telling us that heaven is not what comes after life;
it is the life we can make, through our relationships and through the quiet,
often thankless, fulfillment of duty.
This conclusion strikes me as particularly Jewish. Is this
faithful to the film? One could argue that it is a secular interpretation of
redemption. But the only moment in the film when the outside world intrudes is
when George reads a newspaper article to Anne about a reconciliation between Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the American President. The scene makes
sense if it is informing us of the religious orientation of the director. Many
Jews, for millennia skeptical of a supernatural heaven, will recognize their
own values in this film.
