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| Fantine Harduin and Jean-Louis Trintignant in Happy End |
Georges Laurent: Jean-Louis Trintignant
Thomas Laurent: Mathieu Kassovitz
Eve Laurent: Fantine Harduin
Pierre Laurent: Franz Rogowski
Anaïs: Laura Verlinden
Nathalie: Aurélia Petit
Lawrence Bradshaw: Toby Jones
Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Cinematography: Christian Berger
Production design: Olivier Radot
Film editing: Monika Willi
When does style become mannerism? I think it has happened to Michael Haneke in Happy End, a chilly and detached look at a wealthy, dysfunctional family. Haneke's previous film, Amour (2012), showed signs that he was able to transcend his impulse to show off with the camera and to cast a cold eye on his characters; there was real feeling in the relationship between the elderly couple in that film, and Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva filled them with life and its consequent pain. But in Happy End, Haneke is so remote from his characters that even actors as skilled as Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert can't quite make them work. Trintignant comes closest: As the patriarch of Happy End's Laurent family, he allows the aging Georges Laurent to show some tormented humanity, even though it's masked by cynicism. But Haneke also resorts to manipulating the camera to try to make sure we're never deeply involved with anyone in the film. When Pierre, Georges's grandson, tries to make things right with the family of a construction worker injured in an accident at the site of one of the Laurent family's projects, he goes to the apartment building where they live, but is badly beaten by the worker's son. Haneke decides to film the entire incident at a distance in a single long take. We watch from the street as Pierre enters the courtyard, rings a bell, waits for the man to come to the door and talk for a while with Pierre -- we're too far away to hear their conversation -- before the man erupts into violence; when the man is gone, Pierre picks himself up and drags himself painfully back to the street, where a passing woman asks if he needs help. Admittedly, there's a tension in the scene because we don't quite know what's going on -- at this point we're not even entirely sure who Pierre is -- but it also feels mannered in execution, a tour de force for its own sake. The world of Happy End is a fallen one, which Haneke makes explicit by calling a key character Eve. She's the daughter of Georges Laurent's son, Thomas, but Thomas and Eve's mother have separated and she barely knows her father. Eve opens the film by spying on her mother with her cell phone camera, leaving text messages on the screen showing her contempt for her mother. Before long, Eve has gone to live with her father and his new wife after poisoning her mother with an overdose of prescription medications. And by the end of the film, Eve is perfectly willing to help Georges, her grandfather, commit suicide. This is the stuff of either melodrama or black comedy, but Haneke plays it with such remoteness that it winds up being neither -- or perhaps both, which is unsettling. For those who like to be unsettled, that may be enough, but despite some well-executed scenes throughout the film, it wasn't enough for me.
