Amour
First of all, I need to talk a little bit about the circumstances in which I watched this movie. (If you don’t want to read this, skip to paragraph 2.) It was on a Delta flight from Minnesota to Amsterdam, 8 hours on the plane alone with 20 month old O on my lap, which was most likely the worst flight I have ever had. The flight attendants scolded me for walking down the aisle, so I put O into my lap against his wishes and he kicked his legs in response. Needless to say, the flight attendants scolded me for that again. “Ma’am, it’s your responsibility to control your child.” Hello? Did she expect me to hold his legs at all times? Does she have any idea what kind of crying would ensue? (The solution would have been to let that annoying lady before me sit somewhere else, which incidentally was what they did when her husband suddenly had a heart problem during the flight.) Then one of them forgot me when serving water, which pretty much has never happened to me before in my life. Since we really needed water I confronted the flight attendant who proceeded to lie to my face about how she looked at me and I said “nothing”. Yeah, right, after being thirsty forever and waiting for her to finally reach my row I said “nothing” to her? (Apparently this was their MO, they also failed to give my neighbor sugar for her tea, and when she asked for it, they failed to give her an item to stir the tea). Actually, I don’t even want to think about this anymore (that is how much that experience horrified me), but I also find it important to keep this in mind just in case I go through another hellish flight again. Ironically, Delta is supposed to be one of the better airlines for travelling with children (and to be fair, things went really, really well on the way there, just like our Newark-Berlin trip with Delta last year), but this crew just killed me. To be honest, I am used to people being really smitten with O on airplanes. He is the cute, doe-eyed, puffy-cheeked, super quiet obedient type who gets compliments by strangers on his good behavior a lot, and I tend to be pretty amenable to his needs in order to prevent tantrums (i.e. if he is bored, he gets to walk down the aisle a bit), so in this case I refuse to believe that we were the problem. It was their problem for sure.
We are flying Air France next time, by the way, so we will see how it goes with a European airline, which are supposed to be better. This is not a surprise. People in Europe fly much less with their children, while in the US (especially those flights in the middle of the country) average one child per row, so it is comparably easier to be nice if, say, a flight of 600 people only has 3 children like O instead of 20.
I also had another problem, which kind of relates to those incredulous flight attendants. The flight status thingy was broken and I could not reach my phone. On a good flight, I could ask the flight attendants passing by about the time, and they would tell me. This time, the guy grumpily said “we have been in the air for half an hour” which made me realize that the asking nicely thing is not going to work. Fast forward a few hours later, O fell asleep and I wanted something to tell me how long he has been sleeping. So I decided to watch a movie and my choice fell on “Amour”. I had no headphones (and I wanted to monitor O’s sleep) so I actually watched the entire film without sound.
The weirdest aspect about watching this film without any sound is that I also could not be emotionally influenced by the music choices. I have absolutely no idea how the piano playing sounded like, I don’t know how the voices of the people sounded like and I don’t know if the crucial scenes in the film even contained any music. As a result, my impression of this litte chamber piece entirely relies upon the dialogue as translated subtitles and the visuals. Considering that, “Amour” left an astonishing impression on me, I was glued to the screen and felt with the characters intensely. While it’s a long time ahead till we have to seriously think about aging and declining health, the premise of the film and the way Haneke presented the human drama of caring for a loved one who can only get worse and worse deeply spoke to me. Heck, how can it not speak to anyone? (It may not if you don’t love people, I suppose.) I feel silly for this posting to be more about why I watched “Amour” without sound than about “Amour” itself, but I also don’t think that this film needs a lot of words. It’s basically perfection. Also, Emmanuelle Riva’s frail, wrinkle-ridden face is about the most beautiful face I have ever seen. (Sure, she was hot as a young woman too, but actually less beautiful.) I think that face and her dignified beauty at old age make the film even stronger, because much of her suffering comes from her character not being able to preserve her dignity.
I think I would watch the film over and over again, and I definitely should see it one more time with sound, huh?