Diary of Awards Season: Amour

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As a founding member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle, I will vote for my 11th year in our annual awards. I'm now receiving all kinds of screeners in the mail, and I'm catching up with likely candidates that I missed during the year, or movies that haven't yet shown, or movies that I loved and would like to see again. I'd like for this to be a casual series of random thoughts, rather than actual reviews.

Michael  Haneke's Amour is a good film about a terrible subject, which probably leads many critics (and film festival juries) to conclude that it's a great film. It's not. A great film, for me, to start, is one that I'd like to see over and over, and -- as with all other Haneke films -- I don't care ever to see this one again. I always admire Haneke's formidable skill, but there's something rather cruel about his work that makes him seem unreachable.
As of now, Amour is the Palme d'Or winner from last spring's Cannes Film Festival, and TIME magazine has selected it as the year's best film. Many critics, upon seeing a highly disturbing or upsetting film, are faced with a psychological reaction. Having survived this awful experience, they immediately need to tell others about it, and perhaps coerce others to do the same. "I did it, and I survived, and I'm a better person, and now you should do it too." These films can also be likened to vegetables or vitamins. "Try it... it's good for you."
To me, that's not the job of a critic. The job of a critic should be to honestly assess one's emotional reaction to a film, determine how the film achieved this, and write about these things as best as we can. Amour is very unpleasant to watch. Old age is perhaps even more difficult to deal with than death or sickness. It always has been and always will be. Seeing this film will not change anything. It may inspire you to ask yourself if you have what it takes to care for your partner in his or her old age, but nothing can answer that question until the time actually comes.
On the plus side, I did like seeing two old-time stars, Emmanuelle Riva (Hiroshima Mon Amour; Leon Morin, Priest)  and Jean-Louis Trintignant (The Great Silence, The Conformist) in the lead roles. They both also appear in separate segments of Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy. It's worth checking out their earlier work, and worth checking it out again and again.