Jean-Louis Trintignant had a long and distinguished career on stage and screen, but his cinema presence was never stronger or fiercer than in old age. In later characterisations he projected with renewed force a natural keen intelligence, an uningratiating manner and air of being politely, or not so politely, disgusted with the moral vacuities and hypocrisy of everything around him, together with his own tragic and passionate sense of loss.
All of these themes were present in the role which was arguably his greatest: Georges, the elderly retired music teacher in Michael Haneke’s Amour, whose wife Anne (unforgettably played by Emmanuelle Riva) suffers a stroke, and having promised he would never put her in a home, Georges looks after her as best he can in their Paris apartment while her condition deteriorates. Georges’s anguish and his desperately perceived new love for his wife in this terrible new twilight comes across most shockingly in his astonishment and panic at the first sinister symptom – which perhaps owes more to Haneke’s dark imagination than strict clinical accuracy – when Anne appears mysteriously to “freeze” in the kitchen one morning and then come back to life after he has briefly and frantically run out of the room on a pointless mission to get a towel. She has no memory of this uncanny blackout, and Georges yells at poor Anne. Is this her idea of a joke (“une plaisantérie”)? But of course Trintignant shows us that Georges is well aware from the outset that it is not.
