Sitting in a café near an older French couple on holiday – the sort that Haneke’s Amour would have us believe is the height of humanity – they are kind to each other in the distance they leave, the respect for each other’s habits. And I cannot rid myself of the questions: “what catastrophe befell an animal to make it into that? And why do I call it kindness?” She has gone to the toilet and he is scratching behind his ear. I know, though, that the point of the question cannot be to demand a return to the animal. Now he has gone to the toilet and she is frowning out the window. Because returning to the animal would be the second catastrophe, leaving us without the possibility of reflecting on the first. It would extinguish even the memory that there was once an animal there. And is this kindness not resignation in the face of this question? It is the reason why, in Amour, Anne had to die. It is how her damage could be reconciled into her mortality. It is why she could not be made immortal amid wreckage and dereliction. Hanneke’s film ought not to have been called Amour but Gentillesse, the etymology alluding to the taxonomy marking the history that separated the people, les gens, from nature and from themselves. This kindness promises – with more strength even than in life – identity and reconciliation in death. Between love and kindness: in this rupture we learn the difference between Haneke’s film and Kurtág’s Játékok. How boldly they play the old chorale, its words unpronounced: Alle Menschen müssen sterben, / Alles Fleisch vergeht wie Heu; / Was da lebet, muss verderben, / Soll es anders werden neu. [All people must die, / All that is flesh passes like hay; / That which lives must perish, / If it is to become new elsewhere.] The antiphony of György’s bare octaves in the bass and Márta’s incessant reply filling out the harmony in thirds and sixths becomes a moto perpetuo. The aging heartbeat and scampering feet as they play amid the wreckage of the twentieth century, of their lives. This has become a defense of a sort of violence. My cake is finished and my coffee has become cold.