Christian Love in Michael Haneke's Amour

“Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, it is not pompous…” goes the ever-famous passage from 1 Corinthians (1 Cor 13:4). However, what this passage is commonly mistaken for is a description of romantic love – and is therefore used at myriad weddings – while in truth, this passage instead describes the sacrificial love Jesus modeled for all his Christian followers to emulate by virtue of his death on the cross. Both of these forms of love – though predominantly romantic love – have taken root in the world in many of its different aspects, including the entertainment industry. One film that stands out as a paragon of Christian, sacrificial love, and that film is Michael Haneke’s Amour. From beginning to end, through thick and thin, the faithful husband Georges shows steadfast love for his partially paralyzed and slowly dying wife Anne. One instance in which he shows this sacrificial love for Anne is constant throughout the whole film in the way that he is willing to sacrifice his own happiness for the sake of taking care of a deteriorating Anne. He had lived a great many years with Anne in without the plague of her illness, and so it was very difficult for him to continue taking care of her with the memory of the old Anne and the way things used to be in the back of his mind. He also faced difficulty when Anne would be reluctant to drink water or eat. Despite all the challenges he faced in his caretaking of Anne that were all mentally, emotionally, and physically taxing, he sacrificed his own mental, emotional, and physical state in order to care for his wife unto her death. A second instance of Georges love for Anne is when he promises and stays true to the promise he made to Anne to never send her back to the hospital or to a nursing home or hospice after she experienced her first surgery. While he could have made things easier for himself by transferring the burden of a dying Anne into someone else’s hands at a hospice or nursing home, he instead sacrificed his own happiness in order to keep his promise to Anne. Even the ending of the film, in which Georges smothers his Anne to death, can be reconciled with the Christian understanding of love in that he was doing this not out of hatred or selfishness but love. Some may view this as a selfish murder, saying that he smothered Anne to death because he selfishly wished to no longer endure the burden of a sickly wife. However, Georges did this out of profound love for Anne, for he wished no longer to see her suffer. He could have selfishly decided to try and keep her with him as long as possible, disregarding Anne’s suffering and caring only about his own wellbeing. Instead, however, Georges sacrificed prolonged time with the love of his life and therefore his own happiness in order to end Anne’s suffering. As is said in 1 Corinthians, love “does not seek its own interests” (1 Cor 13:5). Georges, all throughout Amour, even in smothering his own life, sacrificed his own interests for the sake of his wife’s. And that is what real Christian love is.