Happy End Dir: Michael Haneke

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Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Jean-louis Trintignant, Toby Jones

Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke serves up a French-language black comedy featuring a dysfunctional family, observations on social media, euthanasia, European class structure and immigration and video surveillance in the age of the smart phone. Unfortunately, the end result of all this is less than the sum of its parts.

The opening scene in Happy End is that of a woman being recorded through a smart phone while she goes about her business in the bathroom…brushing her teeth, combing her hair, etc. We are able to deduct later on that the person behind the camera is 12-year-old Eve (Fantine Harduin), who is now living with her father Thomas Laurent (Mathieu Kassovitiz) while her mother recovers in the hospital, possibly from an overdose.

Isabelle Huppert plays Anne Laurent, the strident matriarch of the family now that her aging father Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is in the early stages of dementia.

The well-to-do Laurents run a construction business based in Calais and early on we witness an accident that takes place on one of their sites in a dramatic, long shot.

Anne’s deadbeat son Pierre (Franz Rogowski), is most likely to blame through neglect and the family goes into lockdown mode, trying to avoid prosecution.

All the while, Eve, newly thrust into the family, watches. She overhears her father’s phone calls, who is married to second wife Anais, to his lover, she hacks into his laptop, reading private messages and she continues to shoot videos on her phone.

Basically, she’s watching hypocrisy all around her, eventually   forging a bond with her 85-year-old grandfather. But even this bond is not healthy. After revealing a shocking fact to Eve about the death of his wife, Georges then plots various ways of following her to the great hereafter, some involving Eve.

With family like this all around it’s not surprising. But it also makes for a film that doesn’t really seem to go anywhere.

Certain details seem difficult to work out, such as Anne’s relationship with banker Lawrence Bradshaw (Toby Jones), and the commentary on bad behaviour by the well-off Laurents to the hired help and the local immigrant population is nothing we haven’t seen already.

Haneke’s film contains some excellent individual scenes…such as Pierre’s karaoke performance…turns out he some decent dance moves even if he has no business acumen…but these add up to little more than a pleasant diversion aided by some enjoyable performances, but not much else.

Marty Duda

 

Marty Duda
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