Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are wiry 80-something retired music teachers who have been together for more than half a century. When Anne suffers two serious strokes and loses her powers of speech and movement, Georges cares for her with the stern ardor of a teen attending to his first love. Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke is renowned for his forbidding parables of families beset by a malefic outside force: Funny Games, Caché, The White Ribbon. The villain here is the decay to which we are all heirs; granted, in the filmmaker’s oeuvre, there is no happy Haneke. But this is his most intimate, positive, human drama. The two great actors, icons of French films since the 1950s, are at the peak of their art in a story of devotion pushed to the limit. The body may wilt and perish, but love — and Amour — will never die.
