Amour

A rather embarrassing meteorological gaffe - a forecast calling for a foot of snow, prompting the closure of Baltimore city schools, museums, and libraries, yielded nothing but a mild drizzle - made this Wednesday an especially odd one. Hopkins was closed, and MICA followed suit, but since Cleo's nursery nobly opened its doors at 10, L. and I treated Cleo to a late-morning hot chocolate and then dropped our daughter off at 11 and set out for an unplanned but welcome midday date. Among the list of long-deferred pleasures: Amour, the Oscar-nominated film that studies the relationship of an elderly Parisian couple whose health begins to deteriorate.

The film opens with a destruction of conventional boundaries, a dissolution of divisions: a door is forcibly thrown open and windows swung wide; we peer at a concert audience from the stage, eliminating the so-called fourth wall of the concert hall. Over the course of the film, we're nudged to think of such erosions of privacy as metaphorical: they are redolent of the losses of privacy that characterize old age, of the loss of strength and autonomy, of a reliance upon generic nurses. A wife can no longer support herself, and must lean clumsily on her husband; the physical distinction between spouses gives way. The husband forgets to close windows, and a pigeon flits into the apartment; the physical distinction between inside and outside, and between human and animal, also gives way.

But at the same time, we're also encouraged to see the aging, failing body as a sort of barrier, or impediment. The same wife, having suffered a stroke, can no longer gesture meaningfully with her right hand, and can no longer enunciate clearly. She tightly purses her mouth, when her husband tries to feed her. Her body hurts, in ways that it cannot usefully articulate. Bodies, as they fail, can thus amplify our isolation - even as they also ironically heighten our dependence upon others.

How to reconcile this push and pull? The film has its own answers, and some of them are dramatic. One of the gentler insinuations, though, seems to involve music. Throughout the film, which is generally solemn and filled only with diegetic sound, there are references to classical music and to its performance: to Schubert, to Beethoven, to Bach. And, repeatedly, these musical allusions carry with them an air of vibrant health. While still healthy, the couple attends and enjoys a recital; they later host an embarrassingly hale pianist, and, as the wife's health disintegrates, she loses the capacity, or will, to listen to such music. Music, the film, suggests is the domain of the living; our passage to death is unscored.

Perhaps. But music only matters, of course, when it's embodied. A score, a page of notes, is music imagined; it is a possibility; it is Platonic. It becomes something else, however, when the foot rests on the sustain pedal, and the fingers depress the keys; when the ear perceives the first note. Of course, it's at that point that error, or subjectivity, may be introduced; the played melody may not be that intended, precisely, by the composer, and the heard melody may be discerned in unpredictable, mortal manners. But it's also at that point that, we might say, the piece is completed, or fully authored. Our bodies vary, and they are fallible; we can never all hear Schubert in the same way. But our bodies also allow us to complete the transaction, to act socially; to traverse the spaces between us, or between us and the 19th century.

The composed score may be timeless, and it is always in a sense free of error. But it is nothing without the contemporary listener. Open windows effect chaos - but also possibility. The hand that cradles the lover's cheek is also the one that slaps the cheek. Which is, in turn, the hand that presses Play on the CD player - and then, later in the evening, presses Stop.