Recently awarded the Best Foreign Film Award in the Golden Globes, the film was a must see for an aficionado of foreign films. However, while the film has an extraordinarily display of dramatization and a increasing momentum of despair and sorrowfulness that breaks the human spirit, it lacks for what it was originally meant to capture by its title. While we are not to idealized love by a high feeling of romanticism, this love spoken of in Amour shows the brokenness that are inescapable in life--but it scandalizes in the climax of the story where Georges decides to take the life of his wife.
The question that comes up of course, is whether George's homicide was an act of love. Georges had spent what might have been couple of weeks as he sees her wife go from fully mobile and conscious, to being restrained to a wheelchair, and later to loose fully her functions of speech and regress her mental abilities. In her last days, Anne is only capable of uttering a word repeatedly, cannot formulate sentences, cannot move on her own and lies in bed most of the day. While the viewer is aware that Anne has lost her will to live, she does not willingly swallow liquids and before she looses her speech tells Georges that she does not want to become an inconvenience for him, Georges act is not expected.
The love that Georges professes is unquestionable, but his last actions are. The film also raises the question of whether Georges takes his life. He is seen writing what it might be a good-bye letter and he is seeing walking out of the apartment with Anne at the end, suggesting this might be in deed be true. Whether George acts against his will in taking the life of his wife or out of despair- we do not know, but the film evokes a great tragedy that reminds us not only of the fragility of life but also of what we are capable to do in the name of love.
I don't know if I agree with you when you said what we're capable of in the name of love, as if George did such atrocity because he loved her. I'm more inclined in the act of desperation he had, he simply dropped the love ball there. He gave up and took the easy way out. I think it teaches us as long as we breathe, every minute is a struggle for mankind, for we have to rely on God's grace to love.
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