France  –  Drama  –  Year: 2017  –  Running time: 107 mins
Languages: French, English

Audience Response:

Rating:  (3.4 from 27 responses)

• Excellent’: 2 votes
• ‘Very Good’: 13 votes
• ‘Good’: 5 votes
• ‘Satisfactory’: 3 votes
• ‘Poor’: 2 votes
• + 2 comments with no rating

Read the comments here or visit our “Happy End” discussion page.

Synopsis:

A satirical nightmare of haute-bourgeois European prosperity. Almost all of Haneke’s classic themes are rehearsed: CFC screened Amour to great acclaim. Although a middle-class family living in Calais deal with a series of setbacks, they pay little attention to the grim conditions in the refugee camps within a few miles of their home.

Haneke’s work here, as always, is unfailingly morose, haunting and impossible to resist.
Colin Covert (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Director: Michael Haneke
Amour (2012) / The White Ribbon (2009) / Funny Games (2007)
Cast:
Isabelle Huppert                             …   Anne Laurent
Jean-Louis Trintignant                    …   Georges Laurent
Mathieu Kassovitz                          …   Thomas Laurent
Fantine Harduin                             …   Eve Laurent
Franz Rogowski                             …   Pierre Laurent
Laura Verlinden                              …   Anaïs
Toby Jones                                     …   Lawrence Bradshaw
(for full cast, and more information, see “Happy End” in IMDB)

CFC Film Notes

It has been suggested by several commentators that, with his film Happy End, Haneke is just re-treading old ground (John Bleasdale, writing for CineVue, described the film as ‘a greatest hits mixtape’).  Certainly, many of Haneke’s old tropes appear (the surreptitious filming of Caché (2005), the jagged, disorientating style of Benny’s Video (1992) and Code Unknown (2000), as just a few examples).  However, rather than just revisited, in Happy End they are somewhat subverted (unlike Caché, the audience know the source of the filming, a comment on today’s teenagers constantly recording events around them on their mobile phone).  In addition, the humour here is lighter and more direct than in much of Haneke’s previous work.

The story revolves around the wealthy Laurent family, a Calais construction dynasty that has just lost a worker in a fatal accident, partly due to negligence on the part of Pierre Laurent, who is destined – one day – to inherit the family business.  With her attempts to downplay the tragedy, Pierre’s business-obsessed mother, Anne (Isabelle Huppert), emerges as the strongest member of the clan.  Contrast Anne with her softer brother, Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz) – a prosperous doctor who is forced to bring 13-year old Eve (his daughter from a previous marriage) to live with his new wife and their infant child (and with another Mistress in the background).  Overseeing all, and with his own closet skeletons, is the declining, domineering patriarch, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant, who we last saw in Amour, playing another Georges, nursing his wife through her final days following a stroke).  As the film progresses, Haneke dangles the carrot that this may be the same Georges – excepting that in the earlier film he was a retired music teacher and his daughter (also played by Huppert), was Eva rather than Anne.  For her part Fantine Harduin, playing the young Eve, more than holds her own against the stellar cast around her.

Haneke’s unique filmmaking style may not be for everyone, and the film is not perfect; Although the action is set in Calais, the film makes a few references to the infamous Jungle refugee camp, that don’t really go anywhere, and the relationship between Anne and Pierre is, to some degree, a less effective take on the mother/son relationship from the Oscar winning Elle.  The film unfolds in short, disjointed scenes with little or no exposition, offering multiple points of entry into the narrative, and with no main protagonist, in the style of a TV Soap Opera.  Through long, static cuts over formal dinners in the family mansion, we eavesdrop on conversations where the Laurents talk about everything other than the issues that guide their decisions.  As well as the aforementioned, voyeuristic, mobile phone footage, we see poetically obscene text messages being written and Construction Site Security Camera footage.

Although failing (unusually for Haneke) to secure any prizes at Cannes, nevertheless Happy End is an extremely clever, thought-provoking and dark reflection on life, death and family relations.

 

Selected UK reviews:

Sight and Sound (Adam Nayman)
Observer (Simran Hans)
Independent (Geoffrey Macnab)

 

 

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