Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintingnant)

Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Oscar winning film Amour, is cold and raw, and music director’s Cecile Lenoir’s meager score intensified Haneke cinematic chill. Amour is a film that is so spare that we are strained to feel every nuance and every exasperating waking moment. Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) are old and married and in love.

Theirs is a simple compassionate love story that becomes compromised by Anne’s paralysis which eventually renders her immobile. Both Anne and Georges are retired music teachers who have cultivated a love for the arts. A joyous evening at a piano recital, a blissful ride home on the bus, and easy talk upon their arrival thereafter suggest that this couple has managed well their marriage. It is effortless. It is fluid. It is lovely; but this is just about all of the ‘romance’ the audience gets. The morning after ushers in the beginning of the end, and no matter how much Georges tries to order his and Anne’s life, control of it creeps out.

Georges and Anne are visited rarely by neighbors and occasionally by their daughter Eva (played by Isabelle Huppert). A former student of Anne’s, played with restraint by French classical pianist Alexandre Tharaud, pays the couple a visit but the conversation is quite uniform—even flat. It is obvious Alexandre is nervous to see the paralyzed hand of his former piano teacher, and Anne does nothing to put him at ease.

Anne

Cinematographer Darius Khondji emphasizes the haunting echo of Anne’s illness that seizes the ambiance of the apartment. Every inch of space in their home has surrendered to the inevitable: Anne will not get well. Yet, Jean-Louis Trintignant’s performance demands our trust that he will deliver Anne back to some semblance of the wife he has known; and we believe in him; and so does Anne.

Amour plays through March 7 at The Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

Abridged audio version @ 33:41 http://www.netnebraska.org/interactive-multimedia/none/friday-live-arts-soul

The Women Make Movies at 40 Festival, runs through March 14.

This weekend’s MetHD Live at Wagner’s Parsifal.

Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters opens at The Ross on March 8.

Barbara (Nina Hoss)

“What’s Barbara’s secret?” is the question we ask throughout Christian Petzold’s Barbara, a sharply pensive but remarkable film. Petzold holds out the answer like a rabbit to a racing greyhound even until the end. It is 1980. Cold War Germany. The superbly talented Nina Hoss, plays Barbara, an East German Doctor from Berlin who smartly negotiates between the evil of the Stasi and the life-affirming healing arts she practices in a rural hospital. There she meets the sympathetic Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), a doctor who cultivates her love for the arts (and eventually for him) but also watches Nina along with the East German secret police.

Barbara is a good story; thin on the dialogue, but thick with potent character interactions which betray every passion and emotion; every fear and desperation. All combine to step away from the common place notions of East Germany: cold and repressive; grey and ominous. Instead, Petzold films flourishing countrysides and forests; colorful apartments, and people, like Barbara and Andre, who invest in those who have come to them for care.

Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld) and Barbara

Yes, Barbara is a good story but Petzold takes far too long to unveil the mystery, and we almost cast aside our investment in the characters. Nina Hoss and Ronald Zehrfeld inhabit their characters to such an extent, however, that we are brought back into the fold. Barbara’s end will strike a hopeful chord with everyone, and that is: No matter the trial, in the end, we are blessed to return home and to be welcomed back.

Barbara plays through February 7 at The Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

Movie Talk at The Ross on Sunday, February 3, at 2:15 pm with Marco Abel and H. Peter Reinkordt after the 12:30 pm screening of Barbara.

The Oscar Nominated Shorts 2013 and The House I Live In both open at The Ross on February 8th

Abridged Audio Version @ 40:06 http://tinyurl.com/bhwqhu6