A very good movie

Since I have always been a fan of Michael Haneke’s work, of course, I was really eager to check this flick. Man, even though the guy is already around 70 years old, he is definitely on fire right now and won with this movie his 2nd Golden Palm in a row at the Cannes Film Festival and it won many other awards as well. And, indeed, it definitely deserved all the praises it has received. Personally, I enjoyed it more than ‘The White Ribbon’ which was pretty good but didn’t really blow me away. Anyway, it is pretty amazing to see the evolution of Haneke through his movies. I mean, he has always been fascinated by death and how mankind deals with it (‘Der siebente Kontinent’, ‘Benny's Video’, ‘71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls’, ‘Funny Games’) but his vision has always been ice cold and pretty much emotionless. Here, he finally gave us the opportunity to dive in his vision of our world but, for once, he allowed us also to invest ourselves in the characters and the end-result was quite amazing. Furthermore, I think it is disappointing that so few movies are dealing with elderly people (even though the older population is ever growing) and, instead, there is always this disappointing focus and obsession on youth. Well, here you finally get a realistic and spellbinding portrait of two old people who are facing the end of their journey together and the subject has never been handled so brilliantly before. Anyway, to conclude, like all the movies directed by Haneke, it was not an easy watch but, as often with this director, it was also quite fascinating to be behold and it is definitely worth a look.

8/10