The film’s subject matter and Haneke’s reputation orient critics and viewers to expect something powerful and thoughtful, and most reviews, including Peter Bradshaw’s brace for The Guardian, praise the film for delivering just that. Including, perhaps, forms of love that are not merely analogues of our cherished feelings, but something unique to them? The pigeon was otherwise quite fortunate. Considering the possibility, it’s worth stepping back and looking at where society and its knowledge-defining practices now stand in regard to the notion of nonhuman thoughts and feelings. Perched on building ledges, chasing scraps of food, taking to the skies at sunset: Each one is a reminder that love is all around us. It is about what it is about. Nobody is twisting a conversation in a direction that allows them to publicise their viewing of Jack Reacher at the Cineworld, but seeing Amour is an accomplishment almost worthy of record in the parish notes. They scratch out sustenance from refuse, handouts, and the seeds of weeds, become symbols of a certain indomitability. It's just not the same without them. Not every pigeon’s tale need be so romantic as Fly High, Fly Low, Don Freeman’s delightful children’s book about the search of Sid for his mate Midge, lost to him—though only for a while—when workers take down the sign in which they’ve made their nest. Part of the reluctance to talk of bird love is rooted in our misgivings about our own love’s biological underpinnings: Is it just chemicals? Matter, Biology, Numbers, Ideas, Culture, Connected. It’s also worth considering whether pigeons might experience aspects of love that we don’t. Resume Reading — What Pigeons Teach Us About Love. Is Amour a ‘perfect’ film? Indeed, science for most of the last several centuries would have found the suggestion risible, suggesting instead that Harold felt—if pigeons could even be said to feel—some instinctive, unconscious urge to stay nearby, an urge with no more emotional resonance than an itch. Lily Tomlin puts in a memorable performance as the sweary star of this charming road movie. Amour might seem pedestrian, but, again, the fault lies with those of us who cannot properly appreciate its elusive je ne sais quoi. As for Harold and Maude, I don’t know how their story ended, or indeed whether it continues. Comédie, Amour et pigeons est aussi une romance. Get Nautilus Editor's Picks and new articles right to your inbox! Perhaps human love is unusually complex, invoking not just physiology but our unique cognitive sophistication. A telling example is Partnerships in Birds: The Study of Monogamy, a collection of studies published in 1996 with the express intent of explaining why birds are monogamous, which makes not a single mention of emotion. He begins nursing her at home—and makes a patient, uncomplaining job of it, as her decline proceeds apace. Last spring I came to know a pair of pigeons. The robin was in surprisingly good health. Ouaip. Birds might not have much in the way of easily recognizable facial expressions, but their biochemistry’s symphonic chain reactions play out in neurological structures that evolved early in life’s history, long before the cerebral cortex itself. Michael Haneke’s study of the impact of a stroke on an elderly married couple not only received the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and two Baftas, but also found itself atop many critics’ lists of best films in Sight and Sound’s round-up of 2012. Best credit Sax consultant, On the Road; dresseur de pigeon, Amour. imdb.com. Georges and Anne are reticent about expressing their mutual love, but this stately film is about the ways in which we demonstrate undying affection without even knowing it. The cachet Haneke has built up with his earlier films also encourages the viewer to indulge in all kinds of allegorical speculation about the meaning of the details we are presented with in Amour, such as the moment a pigeon makes its way into the apartment and takes some deliberate shooing to find its way out again. There is no meaning to such an event on its own. (And while a pigeon in the hallway is no way near as implausible as a cow lying in a bed, the reason for the pigeon in Amour is ultimately just to underscore the film’s championing of fantasy over the stultifying confines of reality). What it’s saying, I think, is that our inevitable, inescapable final crisis is life’s endgame, the business of conducting someone we love to the end of life (in the process of which we must inevitably confront our own mortality). You cannot talk intelligibly about “Amour” without reference to the event. Jean-Louis Trintignant. Cette section est vide, insuffisamment détaillée ou incomplète. On the other side stood her mate, day after day, keeping her company until she was released and the couple rejoined. Could a bird whose basic physiology adapts to changing seasons, who can perceive atmospheric infrasound, and see Earth’s magnetic field, have emotional capacities beyond our own? Thirdly, there is the unavoidable fact that this is a French film by an Austrian auteur, and therefore something best handled as “European.” As much as people here are amused by the stilted and absurdly respectful way in which Americans sometimes view Great Britain as somehow culturally richer, with everyone speaking like the Windsors and steeped in Shakespeare, there is an undeniable tendency on our part to grant to European filmmakers an authority based as much on ignorance as on insight and appreciation. Read the choicest cuts from the Quietus archive: reviews, features and opinion, Vampish, Vulgar and Vacuous: Fellini's La Citta Delle Donne Reappraised, Plastic Surgery Disasters: Behind The Candelabra Reviewed, Coen In The Wind: Inside Llewyn Davis Reviewed, Injustice For All: Ripley's Game Remembered, Mann-erisms: The Films Of Michael Mann Reassessed, Hanks For The Memories: The 'Burbs Revisited, Way Of The Gun: Hollywood's Culture Of Violence, In It With You: Documentary Play Your Gender Reviewed, For Everyone That Follows: The Ballad of Shirley Collins Reviewed, If You Go Down To The Woods: The Ritual Reviewed, 'Ave A Go If You Think You're Dekkard Enough: Blade Runner 2049 Reviewed, King Of The Wild Front-ARRRRRGH: IT Reviewed. His mate, believes MacMahon, had been taking food to him on the snowbank, “and decided to stay with her man.”. Can pigeon-brained attachment manifest in love’s full spectrum, from butterflies-in-the-stomach infatuation to the ecstasy of consummation? Nets in hand, James Adams and his friend Irving Finkelstein watched the insects lapping up salts and proteins dissolved in the muddy...READ MORE. Cette section est vide, insuffisamment détaillée ou incomplète. He takes small respite from a sly cigarette or a blast of Schubert. It just feels good. Almost in cahoots with the immobility of its central characters, Darius Konji’s camera glides, ghost-like, through the autumnal confines of the apartment, occasionally halting to monitor the tragic and humiliating routines that come before death. It is a journey filled with respect and meaning that sets itself in stark contrast to the comparatively frivolous and narcissistic journeys of those lives that insect with George and Anne - including their daughter Eva. There’s also a lovely moment where Georges helps the semi-paralysed Anne from a wheelchair into an armchair, and for a wonderful second they share a brief slow dance. Amour’s mode of presentation may be more sober and distant than that favoured by Brian’s Song or Who Will Love My Children?, but the ultimate effect is the same: We watch as some happy existence is troubled by the arrival of illness, and the bonds of love are tested as a doomed wife is stripped of her faculties and her dignity. “I’ve known mourning doves who were more in love than a lot of the people I’ve known.”. Its legacy is still felt. To Goodall, chimp courtship is too brief to permit deep feelings. In some respects, this task is always a little easier for any old art movie than any old action flick. He tapes the bedroom door shut and catches a pigeon that has flown in through the window. In the end, this isn’t some unfamiliar arty detached view on life with an illness, it’s a conventional story of love, in which illness is used to forge an emotional arc. His films are, in fact, full of compassion, poetry and even – if you really squint – joy. It can happen, that a pigeon flies into a home, or stands on the ledge. Instead she’d take several desultory steps away. Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. This is the reason for the spoiler alert above. And this limpid, almost perfectly executed, film, if it does not save a perfectly wretched movie year, at least stirs some faint hope. As they often do after a rainstorm, butterflies had gathered around puddles on Pigeon Mountain in northwest Georgia. There are incidents, benign and not so benign, with the nurses Georges hires to spell him, but mostly the movie consists of him feeding her, bathing her, doing her hair. Still, many species display a cognitive complexity—awareness of self and others, long-term memory, a capacity for abstract concepts—comparable to primates. I think the message of the film, if it may be said to have one, is that love is sometimes—probably rarely—eternal. As Michael Haneke’s “Amour” opens, Georges and Anne (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, both superb) are French music teachers in their 80s who return happily from a concert to their loving lives. We believe in Truth & Movies. It’s something to imagine. Amour is a mystery story, but of an altogether different kind then the one we expect from this opening scene. LWLies Recommends, Review by David Jenkins Georges, with his light limp and battle-hardened determination, takes it upon himself to make Anne’s protracted journey into the abyss a comfortable one. McGowan and Wascher readily recognize emotion in birds. selon les conventions filmographiques. Perhaps love is not what defines us as human but is something we happen to share with other species, including the humble pigeon. Secondly, there is the often overlooked hype of the art-movie circuit—just as real as that of the Hollywood blockbuster, if altogether more subtle. https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amour_et_Pigeons&oldid=174093529, Article avec une section vide ou incomplète, Portail:Époque contemporaine/Articles liés, licence Creative Commons attribution, partage dans les mêmes conditions, comment citer les auteurs et mentionner la licence. Film history often traces the birth of the French New Wave to 1954 and Francois Truffaut’s critical assault on the “tradition of quality” in French cinema in his polemical “A Certain Tendency” article for Cahiers du Cinema. Nautilus uses cookies to manage your digital subscription and show you your reading progress.