Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)

Cast: Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Lorella Cravotta, Serge Merlin, Jamel Debbouze, Clotilde Mollet, Claire Maurier, Isabelle Nanty, Dominique Pinon, Artus de Penguern, Yolande Moreau, Urbain Canceller, Maurice Bénichou, Michel Robin. Screenplay: Guillaume Laurant, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel. Production design: Aline Bonetto. Film editing: Hervé Schneid. Music: Yann Tiersen.

Amélie is a charming film, but I have to admit that I'm immune to its charms, finding it a bit self-conscious and much too aggressive in thrusting them upon us. It was a huge international hit, however, and remains a favorite of a lot of people whose taste I trust. Chacun à son goût.

Happy End (Michael Haneke, 2017)

Fantine Harduin and Jean-Louis Trintignant in Happy End

Anne Laurent: Isabelle Huppert
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.

Assassin(s) (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1997)

Michel Serrault and Mathieu Kassovitz in Assassin(s)

Mr. Wagner: Michel Serrault
Max: Mathieu Kassovitz
Hélène: Hélène de Fougerolles
Max's Mother: Danièle Lebrun
Léa: Léa Drucker
Mehdi: Mehdi Benoufa
Mr. Vidal: Robert Gendru
Inspector: François Levantal

Director: Mathieu Kassovitz
Screenplay: Nicolas Boukhrief, Mathieu Kassovitz
Cinematography: Pierre Aïm
Production design: Philippe Chiffre
Music: Carter Burwell

Perhaps no movie since Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976) has sledgehammered television quite so thoroughly as Assassin(s). But where Network took the business of television for its target, Assassin(s) aims at the medium's ubiquity and its desensitizing effect on viewers. It's not a novel point, of course, and even the spin writer-director Mathieu Kassovitz decides to give it -- the effect TV has in creating a culture of violence -- is neither fresh nor unquestioned. The story at the film's center is about an aging professional hit man, Mr. Wagner, who takes on a young petty thief, Max, as his apprentice. It's set in the Parisian banlieus that were the socio-political milieu for Kassovitz's earlier (and much better) film about violence, La Haine (1995). It opens with Mr. Wagner guiding Max into the brutal and entirely gratuitous murder of an elderly man, and then flashes back to bring the story up to a recapitulation of the event -- rubbing our noses in it, so to speak. Max is a layabout and a screwup, but there is a core of reluctance within him that Mr. Wagner is determined to obliterate. Eventually, Max takes on his own protégé, a teenager named Mehdi, who is decidedly not reluctant to engage in a little killing, seeing it as just an extension of the video games he plays. Throughout the film, television sets are blaring game shows, commercials, sitcoms, and even nature documentaries in the background, an ironic if sometimes heavy-handed counterpoint to the murders committed by Mr. Wagner, Max, and Mehdi. Kassovitz stages much of the film well, extracting full shock value, and he sometimes embroiders the realism of the story with surreal touches: At one point, when Mr. Wagner is walking away from Max, we see a demonic tail emerge from beneath Wagner's overcoat -- or is it Max, perpetually stoned, who sees this? More effectively, reinforcing Kassovitz's treatment of the effects of television, Mehdi -- who is coming unglued after his first commissioned hit -- watches a TV sitcom about a group of young people that suddenly turns into violent, necrophiliac pornography, accompanied by a laugh track. Kassovitz showed undeniable talent with La Haine, and some of it is on display here. Assassin(s) was booed at the Cannes festival, and has never received a wide commercial release in the United States, but it's something of a fascinating (if often repellent) failure.

La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995)

Would the friendship of the Jew, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), the African, Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and the Arab, Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) be possible in the Parisian banlieus today? For that matter, was it in fact possible when writer-director Mathieu Kassovitz made La Haine in 1995? Or was it a symbolic construct to emphasize solidarity against the Establishment and the corrupt police force, somewhat like the ethnic stews of Italian-, Irish-, and Jewish-Americans (but never, sadly, African-Americans) that Hollywood filmmakers put on bomber crews and destroyers during World War II as a way of promoting solidarity against the enemy powers? The question is rhetorical, of course, and not designed to undermine the importance and brilliance of Kassovitz's terrific (and terrifying) film, made in response to outbreaks of violent protest in the poorer suburbs of Paris. It has the quality of some of the best neo-realist Italian films of the postwar years, with the additional sense of something about to erupt that pervades the film and has not dissipated in the 21 years since it was made. If anything, it has spread into the rest of the world, especially in the post-9/11 era. The trio of actors on whom the film mainly focuses is extraordinary, both individually and as an ensemble.