Happy End
Happy End is anything but cheerful. The new film by Michael Haneke (Funny Games & Amour) is a dark and clinical comedy that dissects middle-class values and desires with the flair of a demented surgeon. We open on a scene in which a hamster’s food is spiked with anti-depressants and it only gets bleaker from there.
The film excavates humour from the most morbid and uncomfortable of situations and generally seems to be mocking bourgeois family values as much as it is trying to understand them. Even the happiest of moments is laced with the threat of some impending catastrophe, or sinister revelation. It is a film constructed like a vast sponge cake of layers alternating between strawberry jam and rat poison.
Little more than snapshots, each scene is a tiny glimmer that dares to invade the lives of the sociopaths and schemers for a minute or two then retreats just as quickly as it arrived. Emails and film snippets regularly intersect the film and seem to reflect Haneke’s desire to turn this into a film of parts and found material, a montage that will shake your moral compass and give you severe emotional whiplash. Haneke has clearly gone to great lengths to write a script with the tone and brutality of a Greek tragedy and goes to even greater lengths to cut out the pivotal moments and glue them back down like a nonsensical ransom note. He seems to be luxuriating in making his audience work hard to catch up, often shooting conversations from a distance so that they are barely audible, or interposing distractions between the viewer and the scene, such as dog barking or a steady stream of traffic. Such methods are as effective and unique as they are maddening and undoubtedly set Haneke above the rest as a master of experimental cinema.
Where this film succeeds with all the bells and whistles and general jangly paraphernalia is in getting you to adopt the disillusionments and narcissistic preoccupations of its protagonists. Only when you have almost utterly lost sight of perspective or reason does it allow reality to filter back in, but only after you’ve caught yourself empathising with the protagonists’ amoral decisions. Setting the story in the wake of the refugee crisis allows for some incredible juxtapositions and the incorporation of refugee survivors serves beautifully to shatter the perfect dome of the Laurent family’s self-entitlement.
Happy End glitters with an all-star cast, with Mathieu Kassovitz and Isabelle Huppert delivering equally chilling performances. But it is Jean-Louis Trintignant as the patriarch grandfather and Fantine Harduin as the troubled granddaughter who steal the show as the generational bookends of the family. Their interactions, set on the fringes of the Laurent family’s twisted games, provide some of the most beautiful and painful moments of the entire feature. Sadly, Toby Jones, despite being an incredibly versatile actor, was massively underused and remained little more than a glorified extra throughout.
I never thought I’d say this about a French film, but it actually could have been longer. We leave the characters almost as soon as we actually start to understand them, and whilst it is clearly trying to be deliberately frustrating and inconclusive, Haneke’s directorial intention comes at the cost of our not being invested in parts of the story. Happy End is intensely clever and could do with a re-watch or ten to tease out every genius but perplexing element, but the problem isn’t that it’s a challenging watch, it’s that it feels like half a film, like a very long trailer and just generally comes all too abruptly to an unhappy end, right before you are offered any sort of
7/10
