Amour (pronounced [a.muʁ]; French: "Love") is a 2012 drama film written and directed by Michael Haneke, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva and Isabelle Huppert.
The narrative focuses on an elderly couple, Anne and Georges, who are retired music teachers with a daughter who lives abroad.
Amour premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival,[5][6] where it won the Palme d'Or, making Haneke the second filmmaker to win twice consecutively.
One day, Anne, seemingly having attempted to commit suicide by falling from a window, tells Georges she doesn't want to go on living.
Alexandre, her former pupil whose performance they attended, stops by and Anne gets dressed up and carries on a lively conversation during the visit, giving Georges hope that her condition was temporary.
Georges imagines that Anne is washing dishes in the kitchen and, speechless, he gazes at her as she cleans up and prepares to leave the house.
The film concludes with a continuation of the opening scene, with Eva seated in the living room after wandering around the now-empty home.
Background characters appeared in the film: Rita Blanco as a concierge and Ramón Agirre as a concierge's husband; Carole Franck and Dinara Droukarova as nurses; Laurent Capelluto and Jean-Michel Monroc as police officers; Suzanne Schmidt as one of the couple's neighbors; and Walid Afkir and Damien Jouillerot as paramedics.
[4] Further funding was granted by the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg in Germany and National Center of Cinematography and the moving image in France.
[14] Trintignant said that he chooses which films he works in on the basis of the director, and said of Haneke that "he has the most complete mastery of the cinematic discipline, from technical aspects like sound and photography to the way he handles actors".
At the same time the director realized that the Swiss-Canadian Léa Pool with La dernière fugue (2010) had created a similar story, about an old man who is taken care of by his wife.
The website's critical consensus reads: "With towering performances and an unflinching script from Michael Haneke, Amour represents an honest, heartwrenching depiction of deep love and responsibility.
"[22] Metacritic gives the film a weighted average rating of 95 out of 100, based on reviews from 44 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
[23] Writing for The Guardian after the Cannes screening, Peter Bradshaw said "this is film-making at the highest pitch of intelligence and insight", naming it the best film of 2012.
"[25] Dave Calhoun of Time Out London also gave the film 5 out of 5 stars, stating "Amour is devastatingly original and unflinching in the way it examines the effect of love on death, and vice versa".
[30] In 2024, Looper ranked it eighth on its list of the "50 Best PG-13 Movies of All Time", writing that the film "shatters your heart while reminding one of the kind of love that makes it possible to not lose all hope in the middle of life's miseries.
"[31] Among the few negative reviews, Calum Marsh of the Slant Magazine gave the film 2 out of 4 stars and indicated that the film "isn't the work of a newly moral or humanistic filmmaker, but another ruse by the same unscrupulous showman whose funny games have been beguiling us for years", adding that "Haneke's gaze, trained from an unbridgeable remove, carries no inflection of empathy; his style is too frigid, his investment too remote, for the world of these characters to open up before us, for their pain to ever feel like something more than functional.
[41][42] At the 38th César Awards, it was nominated in ten categories,[43] winning in five, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress.