Roll Credits: 13 Brilliant Movie Endings

12) Amour (2012)

In 2012, Amour won the most highly esteemed of the Cannes Film Festival awards, the Palme d’Or, by a landslide majority. It went on to be nominated for a further 26 awards across 6 of the most major international awards bodies, and won 16 of them – including best foreign film at the Academy Awards (where it was also nominated in the best picture category). All this, for a film featuring little more than two elderly people (Emmanuelle Riva, who at 85 became the oldest woman to win a BAFTA, and Jean-Louis Trintignant), one Parisian apartment, and a pigeon.

But Amour transcended the boundaries of foreign cinema in a way which many movies in this category aim for, but often don’t quite achieve, instead remaining at a slight distance created by language or cultural differences that we somehow cannot quite completely overcome (many foreign movies have no intention of removing these boundaries, and are wonderful precisely for it.)

Following the decline of once gifted musician Anne after two strokes, and the efforts of her husband Georges to care properly for his wife while attempting to respect her dignity and protect her individual personhood, Amour ceases to be about a French couple living in a French city from the moment that the storyline is revealed. It is, instead, simply about two elderly human beings, who are facing what must be the most devastating challenge known to mankind – the slow disintegration of a loved one into a permanent, debilitating illness that also robs them of all that made them the person that they are.

Many thought that Amour was an attempt by director Michael Haneke to ‘show a softer side.’ Until Amour, Haneke was known for his 1989 debut The Seventh Continent (inspired by a real-life Austrian family who committed group suicide without any apparent reason), 1995’s Funny Games (he also made the 2007 American remake) and 2009’s The White Ribbon (which also won the Palme d’Or) – all of which featured violent and controversial themes such as sadism, child murder, sexual deviancy, and the exploration of evil.

Entitling a film ‘Love’ was either extremely out of character, or an ironic disguise of something that was going to be quite the opposite. It was neither. The love that George must show his wife as she declines physically, mentally and personally before him is brutal and horrifying in its own way: Georges is desperate, exasperated, patient and traumatised all at once – but these are often, in reality, some of the many splendid things of real love. As is, of course, Georges’ eventual decision to end Anne’s suffering himself.

Haneke has always claimed that he dislikes the use of detail and moral clarity in film, and prefers to avoid it. In this way, the ending of Amour is no different to any of his other films. (In fact, many critics argued that it was flagrant support for euthanasia, and that it was wrong to celebrate it this freely.) But in the case of Amour, Haneke does allow something else into the ending.

A few short scenes following Anne’s death show Georges bringing some flowers home to the apartment and cutting them up, and Georges catching a pigeon that keeps getting into the apartment (cradling it for a quiet moment before releasing it). We also see him taping closed Anne’s bedroom door, before going to bed himself in a small bedroom off the kitchen. When he wakes up, he hears movement in the kitchen.

There, he finds Anne, healthy, alive, and washing up. She tells him she is almost done, and to put his shoes on. In stunned silence, Georges moves slowly to do so. At the front door, he wordlessly helps Anne on with her coat. As they go to leave the apartment, Anne asks him if he isn’t bringing his coat. He takes his coat from the hook, and follows her out, closing the door behind them. The very final shot is of their daughter, looking around the now empty apartment.

The audience is most likely meant to assume that, unable to survive without Anne, Georges died in his sleep that night, and that his “waking up” didn’t happen on this plane of reality at all, but in the next. But reference is never made to two bodies, either in the first scene (in which the fire brigade break into the apartment on account of it emitting a terrible smell and discover Anne’s body), or the last.

There is also no clear time scale of when their daughter comes to the empty apartment. It may well be that Georges died much later, and that his imagining Anne in the kitchen was simply him dreaming of what he wanted the most. But the beauty of this scene is that however it is interpreted, Georges has found himself together again with his beloved wife, and as confused as he is, he doesn’t question it. And neither do we.