We haven't been this excited about senior citizen couplehood since Bergman's Saraband. Not that we have any problems with the more extreme samples in his filmography, but we welcome this change of pace for Haneke. Kudos to the Austrian filmmaker for tackling a rarely addressed subject matter head-on and for employing octogenarian screen legends Emmanuelle Riva (Hiroshima Mon Amour) and Jean-Louis Trintignant (The Conformist). The film also happens to be a third pairing with Isabelle Huppert (Time of the Wolf/The Piano Teacher).
Octogenarians put through the test of long lasting love via the hands of Haneke with Isabelle Huppert once again playing the adult daughter? I don't think there'll be shards of broken glass in this one. I'm really looking forward to the filmmaker's chosen tone and discourse on this one -- I imagine it to be soft, tender, and brutally honest depiction of growing old and take on a discourse that many baby-boomers are just beginning to realize -- mortality and the breakdown of the human body via old age is inevitable.
Michael Haneke's film on octogenarians put through the test is receiving some funding coin (from the CNC - National Film and Moving Image Centre) and will now be going by the new title of Love. Formerly known as "These Two", production will begin next month.
It appears that the cinephile in Michael Haneke is the reason for the scrapping of his "old age project" titled Ces Deux. The premise of a deteriorating, aging body but a youthful mind my have been too close to Sarah Polley's Away From Her...