The Pigeon

Anne's death was shocking, but if the pigeon also died that would be pretty troubling because of what it says about Georges, the husband.

He tells the story to his wife about being at camp as a kid and being forced to eat rice pudding which he hated. He then said he got sick and he got to see his mother but he could only see her through a glass window. Then he smothered his wife.

He may have thought that ending her life would be helping her. She didn't feel like eating and drinking anymore and was so out of it she couldn't connect to her own daughter. Also, earlier in the film she bluntly said that she didn't want to deal with everything and wanted it to be over.

When Georges grabs the pigeon it crossed my mind that he might try to kill the pigeon, but we learn that he set it free in the journal entry. When Georges ends his wife's life, as brutal as it was, it seems he did it out of compassion for her. If he killed the pigeon, for no reason except that it's in his home, then it would make him seem like he goes about killing things without any sense of remorse, and that would be truly disturbing.

I had never considered that he killed the pigeon.

When Georges set about capturing it, I took this as him feeling desperate and lonely, after sealing off the appartment from the outside world. He realised the opportunity of cherishing a connection with something living, and quite literally, grasped it.

Are you brade lunner?

Birds, particularly doves and pigeons (fat doves) have traditionally in folklore been used as carriers of the human soul into the hereafter. IMO, the director is telling you in Amour that the husband has released his wife's soul from her body by killing her, which in this case was an act of compassion (that was her desire, not his).

The pigeon has been entering the house seeking his intended (metaphorical?) mission sensing that a death was imminent. On some level, the husband realizes what is happening and , through another act of compassion, frees the pigeon from the apartment and the soul of his wife from earthly existence.

In Blade Runner, a totally different kind of movie, Roy Batty, a non-human android, saves Harrison Ford from falling to his death and gains a human soul by this act (androids supposedly differ from humans because they have no empathy). Batty (Rutger Hauer) then falls down dying, but as he is falling, grasps a pigeon from the building. In his final act of dying, he releases the pigeon which flutters away, up towards the heavens.

I take that the the pigeon is symbolic of the wife's soul. The husband sets them both free.