There’s no escaping it – Amour is a tough movie, made all the more exacting than other Haneke films Funny Games and The White Ribbon by its quiet stillness. Stemming from a purported personal brush with loss, his film examines true love and companionship. Anne enters a fugue state during a seemingly normal breakfast (aren’t they always, until something out of the ordinary happens?) with George. The cause is deemed an obstructed carotid artery, but a successful surgery yields devastating side effects. Anne loses function in the right half of her body, which shows no signs of ever recovering. George must tend Anne’s needs, which include dressing, feeding and bathing. Eventually, Anne’s weakening body infects her spirit as well, and she retreats within herself emotionally.

Amour’s approach is nothing but honest, as are the brave performances of Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant as Anne and George. There isn’t a hint of artifice to these two, who rank among French film royalty. Trintignant gradually reveals the corrosive effect his caretaking takes on him; several scenes with George dealing with a mentally recessive Anne are devastating, but never false. Riva, too, is a one-woman discourse on performance at its purest and most comfortable. Her work is heavenly. Haneke’s choices are also too spare to ever feel manipulative. He never explains, for example, during the recurring presence of their estranged daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert, excellent and essential), just why the relationship between parent and child has grown cold – and yet evidence is visible throughout his very specific movie. It may be depressing to many, but the overall message is clarion clear: decay is a necessary, inevitable denouement to all relationships.

If Amour were merely a sophisticated look at love and loss, it would be a fine picture, but not a masterpiece. What makes Amour the truly transcendent movie that it is – and it is, easily, the best movie of the year – is the subtly cunning visual acuity with which Haneke tells his harrowing tale. Much of the film’s important action, including doctors’ visits and surgeries, are only described, not witnessed. Almost every scene occurs within the confines of the couple’s apartment, which becomes a character unto itself (production designer Jean-Vincent Puzos and set decorator Susanne Haneke have done work as crucial to the film as the choice to cast the impeccable Riva and Trintignant). Cinematographer Darius Khondji, shooting in 1.85:1, adds invaluable perspective to every scene, using perspective to show Anne’s fraying grip on her vitality and, more importantly, George’s shifting frame of mind. (The slow physical decline of the apartment also, of course, mirrors the subtle deterioration of Anne and George’s relationship.) Playwrights should take note of Haneke’s methods. How often do people remark of the impossibility of adapting a work from the stage for the celluloid? Amour exists largely within the world of an apartment, but never feels stagy or confined. Where a director like, say, Roman Polanski would exploit the setting for claustrophobic causes, Haneke succeeds in gifting his mise-en- scène with psychological heft, peeling back layers of character information without feeling the need to highlight for viewers.

Of course, Haneke does follow in the footsteps of storied directors varying from Edwin S. Porter to Bob Fosse to Francis Ford Coppola in his choice to implicate his audience within Anne and George’s situation. In an early scene that does step outside of the apartment, Haneke positions his two leads, still in good health, in the audience of a pupil’s concert. It puts the audience on the same footing as his characters; the watchers become the watched. And it forces us to become active empathizers to the sad ballad of Anne and George. How would we react in their situation? What choices would we make? Most of all, could this really happen to us and our loved ones as well? Visually, viscerally, Haneke’s Amour is a stupendous film about the forms love can take that we try not to think about. And it asserts that from every loss, something far deeper will always be gained.

After Claude Chabrol’s death Sept. 12, 2010, the French New Wave continues to pass into history even though the best films by Nouvelle Vague directors—Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette and others—stay amazingly vital. Chabrol’s final film, Inspector Bellamy, is a good example: Chabrol re-imagines the detective genre in the course of practicing it. Gérard Depardieu plays Inspector Bellamy, whose domestic life with his affectionate wife Françoise (Marie Bunel) is interrupted by a client (Jacques Gamblin) seeking help in a murder case and by Bellamy’s half-brother Jacques (Clovis Cornillac), whose unexpected arrival brings unsettling family demands.

It took a year for Bellamy to open in the U.S. following its premiere in Europe, probably because New Wave movies are no longer hot commercial properties. The nonchalant, almost spontaneous way Bellamy’s life complicates his profession (and vice-versa) challenges the simplistic narratives of current Euro imports. In Bellamy, Chabrol and Depardieu both audaciously reveal their personal approach to the world as opposed to the way films like Carlos, Mesrine and A Prophet—as well as American grindhouse product like Let Me In and The Town—simply concentrate on generic sensationalism.

As the New Wave masters age and their innovations become unfashionable, modern audiences lose connection with the New Wave thrill of rethinking life through the codes of movie narrative. Bellamy’s client’s calls for help have an existential sense that the conscientious inspector cannot avoid. Bellamy sees himself in the client—and in his attraction to the women he meets during his investigation. The film isn’t simply about a case, but about the moral questions of social life, law, marriage, family, sex and privilege.

“Do you think mankind is improving?” Bellamy asks his despairing alcoholic brother. “Did her sexual hunger frighten you?” Bellamy probes his client about a femme fatale. Both questions and answers—posed in Chabrol’s signature style of casual observation—raise the film’s moral inquiry. Bellamy is suffused with humane concern that startlingly enlarges the solid, coherent crime-and-justice plot (co-written by Odile Barski who also co-wrote Techine’s The Girl on the Train). That’s vital art. That’s also Chabrol’s real purpose. Scenes of domestic harmony or friction, flashbacks of criminal activity and human duplicity, have a depth and precision that suggests Chabrol’s masterly summing-up of what he knows about cinema and about human nature. Bellamy’s rivalry with Jacques goes back to the remarkable sibling tension of Chabrol’s 1958 debut Le Beau Serge—Cornillac’s haunted performance even evokes Gerard Blain in that film. Genre is Chabrol’s Maguffin. The New Wave’s favorite icon, Alfred Hitchcock, explained “Maguffin” as: “The thing the hero cares about but the audience doesn’t,” which could also define the difference between profound cinema and trivial, escapist cinema—the stuff Hollywood traditionally emphasizes versus what matters in viewers’ lives. In Bellamy’s various dealings, Chabrol conveys a lyrical sense of the world. (The film is dedicated to “The Two Georges,” saluting the crime novelist Georges Simenon and musician Georges Brassens, whose classic songs articulate several characters’ points of view and even inspire a trial lawyer’s whimsical summation.) All the film’s dramatic tensions get distilled in exchanges that could be either literary apercus or song cues: “You have to forgive the weak. Why? Because they’re weak, that’s how it is,” and “He thought the world was a mess. He was right. Right doesn’t make you happy. No, it’s the opposite.”

It turns out Bellamy was a summing-up for Chabrol after all. Moviemaking this rich is passing from our culture.
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Inspector Bellamy
Directed by Claude Chabrol
At the IFC Center
Runtime: 110 min.