"Amour" -- What is Love All About?

Popular culture at its best is a channel for an encounter with reality that can be part of our ever-developing need for sustenance as people.  On an individual and community level it can feed us. The 2012 film 'Amour' is one such example.  Film, art, poetry, music and drama are the gifts of the gods.

The film ended.  No one moved. The theater remained silent.  A near full house then began to leave the film "Amour" sharing an extended silence.  No music accompanied the credits.  We were left with our own feelings and the sense that others too were dealing with some unexpected emotions.

Thomas Vinterberg, who directs, leads us gradually tothe center of being, the heart of living. The no-blinking honesty of the story unfolds from the easily understood to the more deeply problematic. Moment by moment  of unvarnished truth  absorbs and infects us with what commitment calls for when a loved one is dying.

Georges and Ann, in their 80's, provide a lesson in 'processing life.'  They leave us with the question, "how do you or will you handle life when it goes off course?"  Their answer is 'Amour', love,  but it is not the  love of pop culture.  It is a love beyond the romantic or sentimental.   It is hard core--hard dore practical and continual care that demands 100% devotion, a care we can never really fulfill.  That is the dilemma.

'Amour' gives us an opportunity to re-think how we process life,  how we 'love.'

Couples making life long commitment through marriage in our time like to write their own vows.  'Amour' asks, 'do our vows capture the reality of love?'  Or do the tempt us to dodge what we know is true?  Traditional vows set the bar very, very high.

 I, (name), take you, (name), for my lawful wife (husband), to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.

That is a very high standard.  It is total devotion.  All excuses for why a relationship might not work are swept away in the wake of this commitment.  We commit ourselves to an impossible kind of relationship.  We tend to forget that this kind of commitment happens in the context of a community of 'forgiveness'--you will fall short, but we will be there.  When we aren't an even greater sense of being or power of life will be.

Anne and Georges find this power in music. It strengthens them beyond what they can naturally give each other.  But then life requires even more of them.  They are finally left to use the gift of their commitment to ultimately love one another.

Age and illness gradually gives them choices they do not want.  They proceed painstakingly to adopt the kind of mundane day-by-day decisions that require more.  It is no longer adequate or sustaining to share music or words of affection or even acts of kindness.  The community and family aren't much use to them either.

Life that once called for one kind of care shift almost without notice to require a new level of attention.   No longer primarily emotion or romance, love is an act, an act of care that requires every ounce of physical and mental strength Georges can call on.

Yet, neither Georges nor Anne look to others for empathy or sympathy.  They understand the potential illusion of co-dependence.  It is their lives they are responsible for. This is now their live and others cannot help change the situation.

They will work through the choices as they see them finding neighbors, physicians and home health care to assist them, but they have no tolerance for well-meaning, yet misinformed or misdirected intentions.

They suffer the additional agony of having those closest to them misunderstand who Georges and Anne are and have to be now.  False comfort is not a friend.

From the earliest stories of humanity, the popular myths present life only through a lens of two choices--something is either good or bad.   Happy is better than sad.  Light is better than dark.

Georges and Anne make a different choices.  There is no 'good' and no 'bad', there is only a 'yes' to what is.   At the end of a day filled with changing diapers, and bedding; making meals that won't be eaten; listening to her incoherent cries;  knowing that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will be exactly the same, only harder because of the repetition, Georges loves it all.  He doesn't like it.  But he does not shirk his duty of love.  He has promised her.  He will not let her down.  Anne, too, only occasionally alert,  does all that is humanly possible to love back.

It is not clear if they are 'happy' or 'sad' or simply accepting on some level that their choices are horribly limited.  Words like 'meaning' or 'hope' or 'cure' don't exist for them.  Neither do they feel guilty about rejecting easy but inauthentic options.  They are not attracted to take paths that lead further into deception.

'Amour' is pitch-perfect in almost every way.   No moment is wasted.  There is no extraneous scenery or characters or dialogue or acting or truth.  This leads full circle to the silence that enveloped the audience.  We're left kind of naked, but not ashamed.  Exposed but not fearful. Devastated but not without possibility.

In viewing 'Amour' some are met by mystery in the ordinary.  Is there any experience in life that is more important than that?  Or is that 'the heart of the matter?'