Saturday, June 3, 2017

Happy End (2017)

Happy End (2017)


IMDB Rating : 7.8/10

1h 47min | Drama
A drama about a family set in Calais with the European refugee crisis as the backdrop.
Director: Michael Haneke
Writer: Michael Haneke
Stars: Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz 
IMDB link Herre


Movie Rating ★★★★★ 

 Michael Haneke's satanic soap opera of pure sociopathy
Peter Bradshaw
It hardly needs saying that the adjective in the title is about as accurate as the one in Haneke’s Funny Games. Happy End is a satirical nightmare of haute-bourgeois European prosperity: as stark, brilliant and unforgiving as a halogen light. It is not a new direction for this film-maker, admittedly, but an existing direction pursued with the same dazzling inspiration as ever. It is also as gripping as a satanically inspired soap opera, a dynasty of lost souls.
The movie rehearses almost all of Haneke’s classic themes and visual ideas: family dysfunction, inter-generational revenge, and the poisonous suppression of guilt and the return of the repressed. There is the horror of death combined with a Thanatos-like longing for its deliverance – one line in particular shows how Happy End has been inspired by the climactic moment of his previous film, Amour.
There is the distinctive preoccupation with surveillance and video recording as technologically unsparing moral reproaches to what we choose not to see in our own behaviour. And Haneke combines this with a new interest in the affectless visual texture of social-media livestreaming, instant messaging, and YouTube supercuts.
Often Haneke’s cinema is a cousin to conventional horror, conventional thrillers. Happy End is no exception. It is almost a genre movie. But the genre is that of Haneke’s own invention. It is unmistakably his work, presented with his usual masterly compositional flair, a mosaic of horror, filmed by cinematographer Christian Berger in crystal-clear light, often with icily detached long-shot camera positions. One character’s face is in fact never shown clearly at all – a diabolically apposite device. The narrative sometimes takes insidious little leaps forward, allowing us to register with a lurch the awful things that have been passed over.
Yet here there is an intriguing new tang of comedy or even grisly farce. The final images of the movie may intend an echo of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, and the unusual presence of a British actor, and the seaside location, made me wonder if Haneke, like Alain Resnais, had conceived an interest in that often underestimated master of middle class horror: Alan Ayckbourn. There is comedy in Happy End, of the most glacial sort. One scene shows the entire cast, at a grand family party, listening to a musical performance which – even without what we know about the musician – would be preposterous, reeking with imposture and deceit.
Of course, with a Haneke movie, we are waiting a final flourish of violence or shock. Inevitably, perhaps, this comes from Huppert. But it is a tiny, almost microscopic incursion, a nasty little assault that perhaps belongs to the schoolyard, in keeping with the register of malign absurdity. And yet when it came, the entire audience in my screening gave a dismayed yelp. And the final images got something between a laugh and a wince. This is a black comedy of pure sociopathy.
Read full review at The Guardian


Happy End leads the viewer by the hand inside the home of a wealthy family of monsters, the Laurents, who have made their fortune with a French construction firm that is now on the rocks. If the story sounds familiar, it’s because it’s been done many times before, though Haneke’s masterful Euro-Gothic touch and a riveting cast headlined by Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant give it a modernist update and a note of black humor.
Still, there seems to be something missing here.
 For one thing, it’s hard to pin down the theme of the piece. Is it the poison of power and money that is passed down from generation to generation? The lack of love or any other type of emotional connection among family members? The virtual enslavement of the servants and the hypocrisy of pretending to care about their welfare, but then not sending their little girl to get rabies shots when she’s bitten by the watchdog? The problem is that it’s all of the above, a general social malaise involving the upper class, the lower class and the new outcasts — the African migrants stuck in Europe dreaming of a better life. Not by chance is the story set in Calais, home of the infamous migrant Jungle.
Another consideration is that by casting the aged Trintignant as the retired patriarch whose wife has died under the same circumstances as Emmanuelle Riva's character in Amour, and adding the fact that his name is Georges and his daughter is played by Isabelle Huppert, Haneke strongly suggests that this is to be read as some kind of sequel to Amour. It answers the question about whether Georges died with his wife at the end of that movie. In this scenario, he didn’t but surely wishes he had, considering the family he’s forced to live with. His mind is also going, and he’s confined to a wheelchair. The singleminded desire of Trintignant’s amusingly feisty old-timer is to commit suicide any way he can, whomever he has to involve to do it — be it his barber, migrants on the street or a child.
As in many of the director’s films, children are the first victims of adult hypocrisy and soon become perpetrators of evil themselves. Here these dark possibilities remain veiled, just hinted at, and the viewer is left to puzzle out their meaning
Haneke’s dry filming style and geometrically balanced framing are, as always, a great pleasure to watch, creating not just an unsettling atmosphere but revealing hidden meanings, along with Christian Berger’s crisp and businesslike lighting, Olivier Radot’s stylish set design and editor Monika Willi’s near-perfect cutting. 
Read full review at Hollywood reporter


 Movie Rating ★★★☆☆ 

 Even with a Sia number, Michael Haneke's latest outrage feels shockingly familiar  
Tim Robey

When a film starts with creepy, Facebook-Live-style cameraphone footage, secretly observing her bathroom rituals, of a character who then spends the rest of it vegetatively swaddled in hospital bedsheets, most alert cinephiles could probably have a decent stab at the source. It’s not going to be Ivan Reitman.
No, Michael Haneke is back to many of his old tricks in Happy End, which enfolds the child psychopathy of Benny’s Video, the bourgeois nightmare of Hidden, the euthanasia theme of Amour, and the racial discomfort of Code Unknown into a curious, disconcerting and sometimes insidiously effective greatest hits tableau.
Now 75, the Austrian auteur may not have repeated himself this much since his English-language remake of Funny Games in 2007, but self-plagiarism is the highest form of self-flattery, or something. The characters are an extended family of moneyed French haute-bourgeois types, headed by octogenarian Georges Laurent (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who has passed his construction business on to his daughter Anne (Isabelle Huppert).
On the whole, though, Haneke’s style is less cumulative and more detached than ever. The film steadfastly refuses to coalesce, as thesis, thriller, winking satire on European wealth, despairing family soap opera, or any of the modes it suggests. And this is not to say he even wants it to. It flits from teasing sequence to sequence asking us to notice things: pregnant clues which make their individual contributions to meaning and sink in slowly.
Take the sequence where Georges, now in a wheelchair, rolls down to the local village and asks for help from a group of black guys, offering one of them his watch: the dialogue exchange is played without sound, and there’s a twist when a passing white stranger, more receptive to what we eventually guess he’s asking, gets shooed away.
Meanwhile, if you ever expected Sia’s song Chandelier to make a scene-long karaoke cameo in a Michael Haneke film, while the drunk Pierre cartwheels all over a stage riddled with laser lights, you win first prize for psychic skills.
No one member of the Laurent clan claims a disproportionate share of our sympathy or attention, and Haneke often seems to be shooting them from as far away as possible, flagging up a moralistic distaste about their privilege, their oblivious damage. Huppert’s Anne is mostly exasperated and seeks shortcuts from responsibility. Thomas is caught in a flirtatious phone call by his daughter, who senses everything and knows which buttons to press.
This pretty but unnerving 12-year-old, with her strange fixation on poisoning people, is the most striking character and perhaps the closest thing to the film’s centre. Anyone who has read Agatha Christie’s novel Crooked House, which also features a 12-year-old girl spying on her household and an 85-year-old grandfather – a cantankerous entrepreneur, to boot – may wonder if Haneke took his inspiration from it.
The director’s game is level, and typically mischievous, but lacks something - and it’s not just the vicious sting at the end of, say, Hidden. Even Haneke’s clinical technique feels like it’s been superseded of late. There are two other films in this year’s Cannes competition – Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless and Ruben Östlund’s The Square – which are aiming their own savage critiques at pampered prosperity. One is more pitiless and uncompromising than Haneke’s, the other far funnier. Both are more brilliant formally.
Happy End is Haneke supplementing his old routines with a wilful refusal of ante-upping: if his career to date is a series of formidable chapters, here are the footnotes.
 Read full review at Telegraph







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