Love, Deadly But Vibrant Behind Closed Doors by Michael Haneke (review)

Arte will broadcast this drama with Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant this evening, followed by the documentary Trintignant by Trintignant.

This Wednesday evening, Arte will offer Love at 8:55 p.m. The 2012 Palme d’Or returned First during its screening on the Croisette. At 11 p.m., time for the documentary Trintignant by Trintignant, already visible for free on the channel's website.

The pitch : Anne and Georges live together in a beautiful Parisian apartment and form a united couple. When Anne falls ill, Georges takes care of her and tries at all costs to keep her afloat…

What is it worth? 2h04 locked in a Parisian four-room apartment, does that tempt you? This is the experience that Haneke offers. Deadly closed door watching two old people dying, Love (not so ironic title) recounts the long agony ofEmmanuelle Riva and the survival of Jean-Louis Trintignant. Michael Haneke with its clinical style, its fixed sequence shots at the limit of the bearable and its ballistic coldness is not in lace. Everything goes: the comfort layers ofEmmanuelle Rivahis death groans, Trintignant's mute stoicism, his suppressed violence which could explode at any moment… Love is a film about the decline and the bodies of these two aging icons – Trintignant's limp, Riva's progressive paralysis, her classic beauty fading little by little. A Beckettian film which gradually reduces two lives to bodily annoyances (peeing, pulling up your pants afterwards, drinking without being able to open your mouth, banging your chair against the walls…).

Michael Haneke: “We talk a lot about the Oscars, but I'm looking forward to the Césars”

But it's more than that: by taking these two theater actors with such a particular voice (the voice ofHiroshima my love and that ofA man and a woman), Haneke constructs a beautiful reflection on the voice of the actor. You have to listen to the infinite modulations of Trintignant moving flatly until the finales to deliver the ironic, angry or sad nuance of his words in a final burst. This lurking voice ready to pounce, which resonates without dryness, voluptuous and biting. And, by contrast, that ofEmmanuelle Riva which fades away little by little, becoming nothing more than a rattle of suffering. Haneke's directing works wonders here. By focusing so closely on the actors and their final tremors, the Austrian has created his most vibrant and perhaps most painful film. If Trintignant or Riva (my love) do not have a price, we will have to cry out at the injustice…

Michael Haneke: “If you make drama, you have to make people angry”

The scene : that of the pigeon. Trintignant tries to catch a bird that has landed by mistake in his apartment.

Gaël Golhen

Jean-Louis Trintignant (1930-2022): “I have appeared in 130 films, that’s at least a hundred too many”