The French-language drama tells the story of an elderly couple dealing with the aftermath of a devastating
stroke.
Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Actress (
Emmanuelle Riva), Best Director (
Michael Haneke), Best Original Screenplay (Haneke), Best Foreign Language Film (Austria)
Anne Laurent (Emmanuelle Riva) and her husband Georges (Jean-Louis
Trintignant), a pair of retired music teachers, live in a roomy,
tastefully furnished Parisian apartment full of books, paintings, and
records. They’re the kind of cultivated upper-middle-class couple that
goes to classical music concerts and, afterward, debates the finer
points of the soloist’s vibrato. They have a middle-aged daughter, the
well-meaning but self-absorbed Eva (the always amazing Isabelle
Huppert), and an enviably contented domestic life, one in which
affectionate flirtation (“Did I tell you you looked pretty tonight?”)
still plays a part. Then one morning, as they’re sitting at breakfast,
Anne suddenly falls silent and stares off into space for several
minutes, oblivious to the increasingly irritated voice of her husband,
whose first reaction is to assume she must be either daydreaming or
pulling some sort of prank. Though she quickly snaps back from this
moment of distraction, it’s the first symptom of a stroke that will soon
paralyze the right side of Anne’s body, putting her in a wheelchair for
good.
I plan on seeing it once it gets to our theaters, It has to be more uplifting than
Diving Bell and the Butterfly or Water for Elephants.
