Director Michael Haneke on the set with actress Fantine Harduin and actor Jean-Louis Trintingant
HAPPY END B
France Austria Germany
(107 mi) 2017 d: Michael Haneke Official
site [United States]
Happy families are all
alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—opening line from Anna
Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, 1878
Taking place against the backdrop of rapid economic
transformation, globalization has provided a comfortable bourgeois class that
remains safely secluded from any of the real problems the rest of the world
faces, yet wealth brings its own set of problems, as the film depicts a
scathing portrait of emptiness and social malaise, where one-by-one the
skeletons in the dysfunctional family closet are crudely revealed. Recalling similar scenes from Benny's
Video (1992), with an eerie mood established reminiscent of Caché
(Hidden) (2005), the opening live-streaming video scenes shot on a
smartphone amount to a snuff film, with the unseen user expressing their
thoughts via text messages that appear on the bottom of the screen, remarking
upon the utter contempt this person has for their mother, filming an
experiment, first feeding a pet hamster food mixed with the mother’s
anti-depression medicine, showing how easy it is to kill an unsuspecting animal
— Voilà, apparently proud of the results.
Taking the experiment a step further, the camera shows a comatose mother
being led away by a team of paramedics, with the user implicated in her
poisoning. What follows is security
camera footage of a disastrous workplace accident occurring on a construction
site, with one of the immigrant workers seriously injured, where the prognosis
does not look good. Haneke transitions
to an affluent family having dinner at their palatial estate, with African
colonial servants at their beck and call, including the aging patriarch,
Georges Laurent (Jean-Louis Trintingant), former owner of the construction
firm, his workaholic daughter Anne (Isabelle Huppert), who has taken over
running the business, her pampered, overly fragile son Pierre (Franz Rogowski),
who is being groomed to take over the business, yet may be responsible for the
work accident, her brother Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz) and his wife Anaїs (Laura
Verlinden) with a newborn baby, where it’s his ex-wife in the hospital from a
mysterious poisoning, a presumed suicide attempt, and a new arrival Eve
(Fantine Harduin), a lonely, left out 13-year old sent to live under the care
of her estranged father Thomas, as her mother is in a coma, attaching an
identity to those opening scenes. With
all the players introduced, what we quickly realize is that each avoids the
others, with everyone lurking in their own private space, yet the language used
is one of politeness and décor, so as not to alarm anyone. Apparently the biggest sin is the expression
of any anxiety, as wealth produces privacy, where all emotion is suppressed,
minimized, and for the most part avoided at all costs. This is the closeted world of their
existence, like living in a protective bubble that refuses to allow the rest of
the world in.
Little by little secrets are revealed, as Anne’s
relationship to her son Pierre is broken, as he feels useless and unwanted,
never able to live up to Mommy’s expectations, always perceived as a
failure. The more emphatically she
denies these simple truths, the more they are evident, especially to Pierre,
who takes his failures wherever he goes.
In a distant shot we see him at the front door of the tenement building
where the injured worker lives, which he strangely decides to visit, perhaps
out of guilt, maybe offering money, only to get roughed up by a family member
and sent away in disgrace, later rescued by his mother who finds him hiding in
an empty apartment. In a deplorable
gesture, he refers to the household cook Jamila (Nabiha Akkari) as “our
Moroccan slave,” while in another drunken display, we see his pathetic attempt
to sing karaoke, turning into one of the more bizarre scenes of the film set to
the sounds of Sia’s Chandelier, happy end (2017) chandelier
- sia (hipnotik) - YouTube (1:50), raging out of control, “I’m gonna live
like tomorrow doesn’t exist,” where he very nearly injures himself. Not to be outdone, Thomas is involved in his
own illicit affair, where we watch him text various S/M style fantasies on his
laptop to a secret lover, who turns out to be a classical cellist, descending
into a lecherous world of salacious sex, obviously something he doesn’t share
with his own wife. On a trip to the
beach, Eve overhears one of these phone conversations, becoming suspicious he
and his wife are about to break up, leaving her future in limbo. Out of curiosity, and panic, she hacks into
his computer and finds all the prurient messages, sending her over the edge,
taking the rest of her mother’s pills in a blatant suicide attempt, telling her
father afterwards what she’d discovered, accusing him of not being able to love
anyone, certainly not her mother, Anaïs, or herself, leaving Thomas shocked
into silence and disbelief. Shortly
afterwards Eve’s mother dies from the poisoning. In one of the more antiseptic scenes, viewed
inside a window-lined, executive boardroom, Anne and her lawyer are seen
offering money to the family of the accident victim, which seems a small price
to pay for a human life, yet it’s presented as a means to silence them and
prevent them from suing for larger damages, threatening to press charges for
the assault on Pierre if they don’t accept.
This typifies business transactions in the modern era, as it’s all
designed to protect the interests of the wealthy class, taking no
responsibility at all for their own callous indifference, showing little regard
for the actual victims harmed along the way, who are viewed as collateral
damage, part of the price of doing business.
Haneke has always taken an unusual interest in technological
advances, showing how easily people are both fascinated, perhaps even obsessed,
yet also manipulated or harmed by seemingly insignificant actions, like leaving
anonymous videotapes at the front door of a middle class home in Caché
(Hidden) (2005), or rewinding the tape, preventing a heroine’s escape,
suggesting an even more heinous ending in Funny
Games (1997), with this film expressing voyeuristic tendencies through YouTube,
Facebook, G-mail, and Snapchat social media platforms, mimicking the interest
of the public, where just this past year a Facebook user livestreamed a murder
(Facebook
Streams a Murder in Cleveland, and Must Now Face Itself ...), where privacy
and the anonymity of the user allows cruelty to evolve into something far
darker into virtual reality fantasies that come to life, something suggested a
decade earlier in the nightmarish finale of Assayas’s Demonlover
(2002). This film rises to new heights
in a sinister conversation between Eve and her grandfather Georges. Not since Bud Cort in HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971)
have we had a character who so desperately wants to die, which seems to plague
the thoughts of Georges throughout the film, having slipped out of the home in
an earlier failed suicide attempt, running his car into a tree, leaving him
instead with broken bones, confined to a wheelchair, but very much alive. Their conversation is a remarkably candid and
unfiltered discussion of suicide, with each revealing the kind of secrets few
ever actually experience. You can hear a
pin drop in the theater, as this creates a hushed intensity level, bringing
what was once considered taboo to the screen.
According to Haneke, Michael
Haneke: 'I don't have time to waste on social media', this is based on his
own experience with a 92-year old aunt who asked for his help with an assisted
suicide. When he declined, she was
disappointed with him afterwards and carried it out herself weeks later. Somehow this personal incident becomes the
most convincing aspect of his last two films, including Amour
(Love) (2012), with Trintingant (now 87 years old) carrying out his
beloved’s wishes.
Looking back to his very first film, The
Seventh Continent (Der Siebente Kontinent) (1989), suicide is a recurring
theme throughout Haneke films, where the director has a desire to create a
cinema of discomfort, inducing guilt and self-reflection, but actually seems to
be elevating suicide to an ethical choice, much as Fassbinder did in what is
arguably his most personal film, In
a Year of 13 Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden) (1978). The problem here is tone, as it becomes lost
in comical amusement, much like Bud Court’s intrigue with death only makes
viewers appreciate the vibrancy of life that much more. This film, however, is more about failed
expectations, and is not among Haneke’s best, content to rehash familiar themes
of failed responsibility, class disparity, race, economics, moral hypocrisy,
fidelity, family, marriage, carnal desire, and passion, even adding a touch of
colonialist guilt, where special privileges for the wealthy seem to dominate
throughout, viewing the world as if it exists exclusively for them, with money
insulating them from reality. One
particularly revelatory scene shows Anne reprimanding her live-in Moroccan
butler (Hassam Ghancy) for allowing Anne’s own dog to bite his daughter,
bringing chocolates for the bleeding child, who is in tears, ultimately
minimizing the damage, offering a payoff to make it go away, which as far as
she’s concerned settles the issue. The
film ends with a family party set in a seaside restaurant with floor to window
views of the ocean, basically the pompous aristocracy flaunting their
wealth. The party is crashed by her own
son, Pierre, who apparently no one missed, leading his own personal crusade,
showcasing the plight of poor African immigrants, creating pandemonium and a
social awkwardness reminiscent of Östlund’s
The
Square (2017), which Georges uses as a diversionary tactic to carry out his
own aims, failing miserably once again, to the point of comic absurdity, but
causing the kind of consternation that seems to define this film.
