From the prodigious Austrian auteur Michael Haneke, prima facie HAPPY END can be construed as a sequel to AMOUR (2012), with both Jean-Louis Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert returning as another father-daughter pair, but scale-wise, it is an upgrade, with Haneke’s rapier-like scalpel mirthlessly levering at and dissecting a dysfunctional bourgeois household in Calais under a large milieu.
First thing first, extending his attentive exploration related to what constitutes today’s cinematic gaze, Haneke situates his camera on our workaday digital devises, opening with several video clips from a live-recording smartphone (with morbid contents notwithstanding), to the (replay-prompting) footage of a security camera coldly witnessing an abrupt collapse on a construction site, then eyeing erotic exchanges from the screens of a personal email account and a facebook page between two secretive lovers, even to a swaggering Youtube video watched by the 13-year-old Eve Laurent (Harduin, an alumna from Belgium’s Got Talent whose speciality is mentalism), all contributes to his rehashed conception of evil, destruction and lust lurking on the placid surface of a disengaged normalcy.
Restraint and remove is Haneke’s methodological thumbprint, in HAPPY END, this approach is well applied in scenes where violence, mortality and incommunicability flares, such as when the wheelchair-bound, dementia-ailed, world-weary paterfamilias Georges Laurent (Trintignant) approaches a cohort of African immigrants on the street, the camera stays stock-still on the other side of the road, we can merely judge by their body language to infer the content of their conversation, and Georges’ attempt ends in vain. Only after his another proposition falls through we might second-guess that George wants to pay them to kill him. Interestingly, correlating the later scene where Georges’ grandson Pierre (Rogowski) disrupts the “whiteness” of his mother Anne’s (Huppert) engagement party by unsolicitedly bringing a group of refugees from Calais Jungle, Haneke’s seemingly token orchestration of ghettoized Africans as a go-to weapon to debunk the middle-class indifference and complacency packs a less impactful punch than one might expect from his audacious streak.
This happy-less, mansion-dwelling ménage assembles a multi-national cast: as an outsider, Toby Jones is given nearly nil to act as Anne’s British fiancé, though his own distinctive physiognomy standing side by side with Huppert alone adumbrates the grotesquerie of their pairing; Huppert’s Anne is as per usual a brittle businesswoman type whose superficially wholesome life has its feet of clay within her own bloodline; a hale Trintignant fixates on Georges’ one-track mind with crystal-clear, if sometimes dementia-addled perspicacity and his standoffish detachment is the extrinsic outgrowth of a decades-old carapace that he can no longer empathize with the present world and has no will to footle about anymore, yet the bitter irony (indicated by the film’s title and the trenchant ending) is that his holy grail remains as elusive as ever.
Mathieu Kassovitz as Thomas Laurent, Georges’ surgeon son and Eva’s estranged father, comes off as the weakest link here, too lackluster to elicit any emotional investment, and is worse off when in juxtaposition with Harduin’s precocious, simmering acuity, venom descending from a hereditary lineage. Last but not least, there is this fantastic German actor Franz Rogowski, who stunningly presents an incompetent and despondent Pierre as a mind-bending specimen of a poor little rich boy, and Haneke cunningly teases audience with Pierre standing near an open window during a passive-aggressive confrontation with Anne in the middle of the night, hints that he might be a self-destructive head case, which seems to reassure his devotees that the filmmaker is still the flinty hard-liner we are au fait with, perhaps, that is what HAPPY END actually stands for.
referential entries: Haneke’s AMOUR (2012, 8.4/10), FUNNY GAMES (1997, 7.0/10).
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