What would we do for love? What would we do because of how much we love someone? The simple complexity of this question has truly heartbreaking, shocking and unforgettable answers in Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012). Haneke is not known for exploring such topics, but he is adept at burrowing under your skin with uncomfortable truths in the actions of his characters. For this Woman Crush Wednesday, for I am professing my amour for the one and only Emmanuelle Riva. Riva has a long and impressive career, not the least of which also includes her performance as a woman experiencing another torturous side of love in one of the great, indisputable masterpieces of cinema, the dearly departed Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour (a connection clearly referenced in this film’s title).
But it just Amour that we are speaking of today. Here she plays Anne, an elderly retired music teacher struggling to want to live through the debilitating effects of a severe stroke, despite her loving husband’s best efforts to make her comfortable. I feel she still deserves a little love for this role, for it could not have been easy as an octogenarian actress, no matter how spry and lively in reality, to confront her own mortality so directly in a role such as this. This was clearly the most demanding role of any actress in 2012. Not only were the emotional demands of the role staggering, but so were the physical. She abandons all self-consciousness to make us believe in her character’s desire to end her own life rather than force her husband to experience her slow deterioration, and thus witness him lose his own memory of who she once was in the process. Riva also had the gargantuan task of physicalizing the experience of a woman who lost control of half of her body, and to figure out how to emote through this.
Despite how deserving she obviously was, I thought it a miracle that the Oscars even recognized her with a nomination. However, it still smarts to think of the indignity of Riva flying halfway across the world to attend the ceremony, after plumbing serious mental and physical depths to take on this role, only to see the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences declare the superior actress that year to be Hollywood hottie Jennifer Lawrence, for an overhyped, mediocre performance in an overhyped mediocre film (Silver Linings Playbook). Regardless of the sometimes questionable decisions made by the Academy, there is little doubt that Riva’s work in Amour will stand the test of time far more than most actresses in this world. On t’aime Emmanuelle!
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