You may not have noticed, but the Cannes Film Festival begins this week, and it won’t be long before we start hearing how the latest cinematic offerings of a whole host of prolific directors stack up. One of said directors with a new film at the festival is everyone’s favorite Austrian auteur, Michael Haneke, who returns to Cannes for the first time since 2009 when “The White Ribbon” (perhaps his finest piece of work) took home the Palme d’Or.
Haneke’s latest film, “Amour,” is due to screen this Sunday at Cannes, and in anticipation of that, a (unfortunately non-subtitled) trailer for the film has been released. The picture stars Emanuelle Riva, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Alexandre Tharaud and Isabelle Huppert, and follows “a pair of cultivated, retired music teachers and their daughter, who is also a musician, and lives abroad with her family. One day, Anne has an attack, after which the couple's bond of love is severely tested.”
There’s not a lot we can discern from this without subtitles (and hopefully another trailer with those attached will land soon), so for now we’ll just have to go by what we can see, rather than hear. It looks like the action will be mainly confined to the one location, and it looks every inch a Michael Haneke film. The title and the piano music suggests a more positive tone than you might normally expect from the director, but the way it suddenly cuts out at the end suggests that this could be Haneke lulling us into a false sense of security. We’ll be eagerly waiting to hear about this one come Sunday. Sony Pictures Classics will release the film in the U.S. [RopeOfSilicon]
