Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012)

Amour received the Palme d'or at the Festival de Cannes, and was also only the second feature film (after Truffaut's Le Dernier Métro in 1980) to win the five most important Césars: best film, best director, best male actor (Jean-Louis Trintignant), best female actor (Emmanuelle Riva) and best screenplay (Haneke).

This is a superb film in which Georges and Anne are octogenarians and both retired classical music teachers. Their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) is also a musician and is very concerned for both her parents: Anne gradually becoming bound to a wheelchair, then bedridden but refusing to go into a home, the situation becomes increasingly worse for the relatively healthy Georges.

This could be a play in that the film is a huis clos involving essentially two people in one flat. As Anne's health becomes increasingly worse and she can't speak, Georges eventually has to resort to euthanasia. Amour? À mort. A wonderful, but so painful, unsentimental love story.