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
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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