Sunday Review: Amour and Silver Linings Playbook

Love and death in two films

By Jonathan Price

Romeo and Juliet condenses two of literature’s great themes, love and death, in the liebestod of romantic young love, leaving both lovers beautifully and tragically dead before they reach 20. Most of us survive young love and our 20s and have gone on to watch a zillion movies which may be loosely designated romantic comedies. The romantic comedy may be one of Hollywood’s most successful formats, but a viewer easily tires of it or turns to sterner fare. This year Amour and Silver Linings Playbook, both nominated for Oscars for best actress and best film, discovered a new twist on this perennial motif. See them absolutely, but if you like surprises, you should stop reading here.


Hemingway wrote that if two people are in love it will not end well, because one will die first. His Romeo and Juliet, combining love and war, was Farewell to Arms. But Amour (2012, directed by Michael Haneke and winner of the Oscar for best foreign-language film), despite its promising title of Love, doesn’t quite take that route because it explores the eventual painful and excruciating death as an aging couple confronts the mental and physical deterioration of one of the partners as the other—in increasing isolation in their elegant, comfortable, and confining Parisian apartment—tries to care for her. We are shown so much that we would rather not see or not imagine, and the metteur-en-scène keeps showing us the disconcerting side of scenes that upset our expectations. We begin, for example, with the end. Firemen and other last responders break into a sealed set of rooms only to discover an elegantly clad aging female body lying on a bed surrounded by flowers. And the rest of the film simply—or not so simply—tells us what led up to that scene.
    Amour is remarkable for several defamiliarizing scenes, including the second one, where we watch an audience watching. And we’re waiting and trying to figure out what’s going on. Later we see patches of some impressionist landscapes, and again, we’re uncertain. Are these the paintings on the walls of the Parisian apartment? Apparently not. These destabilizing elements reveal an integrated and meaningful artistic life and marriage breaking down under the pressures of mental disintegration, as in an early breakfast scene in which the wife just freezes and can’t talk and doesn’t seem to respond: the first clue the couple has that their love is now threatened by disintegration and death.
    This Parisian couple has had a life together in music, playing the piano, instructing talented young students; their daughter is married, unhappily, to a musician. But the wife’s disintegration, in two words, is not pretty or musical or artistic. Her left side is paralyzed by a stroke, her speech disintegrates and eventually disappears; she becomes at times little more than an animate object, illuminated by the sense there is someone within. We watch her fed reluctantly or unwillingly by nurse and husband, watch her nude, being bathed upright in the shower—these are not the glamorous scenes of romance or sex that we usually associate with French films, or that the actors themselves starred in during their youth (Jean-Louis Trintignant in A Man and a Woman, Emmanuelle Riva in Hiroshima, Mon Amour). The grimaces Emmanuelle Riva evokes around the mouth and shoulders are painful, excruciating, and among the reasons she was nominated for an acting award. Music arrives now only in snatches, conversation, and memories—a beautiful respite for the audience as we hear snatches of Bach, of a Beethoven “Bagatelle” and other pieces. But neither art nor love nor the daughter provides much balm for the unrelenting end of life. The husband is patient, caring; the wife is frequently resentful or lost in her world or even suicidal. Hemingway was right: this cannot end well. We see the process that leads to the end, to the not particularly imaginative way the husband administers euthanasia. When Amour is gone, we are left with mystery, but also sympathy and the recognition of a painful truth about love.

In Shakespeare, tragedies often end with multiple bodies littering the stage, comedies with multiple simultaneous marriages. As we shift from Amour to Silver Linings Playbook (2012, directed by David O. Russell and winner of the Oscar for best actress in a leading role—Jennifer Lawrence), we move from the tragedy of love to its comedy or possibility. Yet Playbook is hardly your typical romantic comedy, because it begins, as Amour ends, in mutual loss. Pat Solitaro, the male half of the film’s romantic couple, is first seen in a mental institution, and he is suffering from bipolar disorder. Mental illness here is a convenient trope, but the dramatization of bipolar disorder doesn’t fit the medical conventions of the disease, and the star’s psychiatrist unprofessionally socializes with him at a football game and comes to his home; but hey, it’s Hollywood. Pat is estranged from his wife, who had been having an affair with a colleague; Pat had attacked the colleague mercilessly, been sent by the justice system to a mental institution, and now his mother’s care. Pat has lost wife, job, house, personal freedom, and social respect: many acquaintances and neighbors flee him when he approaches. Another aging adolescent relegated to living with her parents, Tiffany Maxwell is also suffering romantic loss, after her policeman husband died suddenly and unexpectedly: she adopted a project of going to bed with everyone at work, including the women. The two not only suffer from emotional distress, they are incautiously outspoken and direct, and often hilarious. Despite Pat’s obsession with his estranged wife and (illegal) attempts to reunite with her, we sense that these two are both seeking replacements for lost love.
    Pat’s extreme behavior is first shown when he expels Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms from his attic room via a closed window because the ending disappoints him; it doesn’t fit his need for romantic fulfillment, since Catherine Barkley dies in childbirth. It is 4 a.m.; nevertheless Pat also goes immediately to his parents’ bedroom to complain. The outrageous behavior here is essentially comic, though it would clearly be disruptive and disturbing in a real family. We love and are amused by these outrageous scenes in films; in “real life” it would be painful to live with them in our lovers or our family or our neighborhood.
    Eventually the audience realizes that Pat and Tiffany are moving much closer to each other emotionally, a fairly typical pattern for a romantic comedy where the initial participants are seen as antagonists. After all, they do have something in common—their illnesses—and in another comic scene at a dinner party they discuss, quite astutely, the emotional and physical effects of the various pharmacopoeia they have ingested and occasionally rejected. So despite logic, realism, society, and statistical likelihood, according to the dictates of the genre, they are both physically attractive and therefore made for each other. Hollywood romantic comedy tends to bend the curve of human likelihood to satisfy our popcorn needs.
    In addition to their underlying attraction, the relationship of Pat and Tiffany is built further on a kind of occupational therapy as they work together in Tiffany’s studio to perfect a couples’ dance routine, a sequence that extends over weeks and is tied artfully together by a cut from Dylan and Cash singing “Girl from the North Country Fair.” Their burgeoning affair, seemingly unbeknownst to Pat, transcends the reservations of their watchful parents with whom they each, severally, live. In a memorable comic scene, Tiffany defends her influence on Pat and the family’s Philadephia obsession with the Eagles in an artful, surprising, and comic demonstration of her knowledge of football scores, lore, and even the state motto of New York. Ultimately the film, albeit unconvincingly and unrealistically, is a portrayal of illness rescued (and cured) by love. The climax, at the dance contest for which Tiffany had convinced Pat to prepare, entwines all the film’s themes in a trifecta of success—for Pat’s transcendence over his doomed obsession with his estranged wife, for his father’s seemingly doomed bets and bookie business, for the relation of Pat and Tiffany.

One film, the romantic comedy, ends well; the other doesn’t. Each has found a new artistic twist on the perennial subject of love.
_______________
Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Price

Please comment