Playing with Fire: Art and the Seductive Power of Pain

Abstract

I almost didn’t make it through Amour, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film on Sunday. It wasn’t that I wasn’t prepared: I knew what the movie was about and, having seen several other of Michael Haneke’s movies and read about his work, was familiar with his sadistic tendencies as a filmmaker. ‘Depressing’ was the word used by everyone I spoke to about the film, but depressing has never been a descriptor that puts me off; it’s rare that a movie, even an aggressively tragic one, depresses me. More often, I find myself simply fascinated, and even delighted, by the range of emotions cinema can capture. But Amour depressed me. It depressed me to the point that my chest felt tight, that fat tears streamed down my face as I struggled to keep my shoulders from heaving too noticeably. It depressed me to the point that I seriously contemplated escaping to the bathroom to have it out and collect myself, and considered leaving the theatre altogether.¹

This is how Hannah Goldfield begins a recent New Yorker column entitled ‘Surviving Amour’. Towards the end of the piece, in an attempt to trace the origins of her intense reaction, Goldfield conjectures that her sadness ‘arose from how close to home Amour hit’. She goes on to say that for her, Amour hit close to home because the tragic fate of the film’s main characters, Georges and Anne, bore striking resemblance to that of her own grandparents at the end of their lives.