Happy End **** (2017, Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz, Toby Jones, Fantine Harduin) – Movie Review

What’s wrong with Michael Haneke? Why is he so miserable? Or, if you’re a fan, what’s right with Michael Haneke? And, I suppose this film is both uber-miserable and just right. It may win a lot of admirers – it deserves to – but I can’t see it winning many friends. So, Michael Haneke business as usual then, huh?

Well, here he is in Calais, with a bunch of well-heeled French folks. He doesn’t seem to like them very much, which is a pity because they are played by some very distinguished people. The rich French family have a construction business, which is is trouble, but not nearly as much trouble as the family itself. They take dysfunctional to the nth degree. They are all self-obsessed narcissists, a truly awful selection of human beings.

The refugee crisis is all around them as a backdrop, but they have too many crises of their own to care. They only ‘care’ about anything if something forces them to have to. And then they can just pay for lawyers to sort it out.

The obviously ironically titled Happy End is classy and clever, but, yes, so miserable. [Spoiler alert] The Happy End has granddad (Jean-Louis Trintignant) going through the motions of celebrating his 85th birthday, while trying to find a way to die, to put himself out of his comfortable misery. His barber can’t or won’t help with providing a gun or poison. Maybe his sullen, near- catatonic grand-daughter (Fantine Harduin) can help out?

Haneke turns is a typically disturbing and alienating film. It’s not going to be anybody’s idea of a fun night out, unless they are masochists or prospective suicides. Despite flashes of black humour throughout, Haneke takes bleak to the max. It’s not a nice place to be, but he does kit it out really well. It has no formal beauty. It is visually harsh and sharp and jagged. Perhaps surprisingly then, the film is engrossing and seductive. That’s a clever trick to pull off.

A bleak house in Calais. Michael Haneke doesn’t believe in Happy Endings.

What are his targets and his topics? It is everything and everybody. Cell phones and computers have destroyed us, maybe. But we are easily destroyed. Humankind is crap, self regarding and self obsessed, always was, still is, that’s what Haneke is saying. There’s no room for a Happy End, because we are doomed, destined to be a lousy, decaying species. The ending seems to say humanity is all at sea, we are drowning in it.

The performances by Trintignant, Harduin, Isabelle Huppert, Mathieu Kassovitz, and Toby Jones are impeccable, as you would expect. Huppert and Trintignant both starred in Haneke’s Amour (2012). Amour carried a huge emotional surge, while Happy End is enormously chilly, chilling even.

The nominations but not wins at the Cannes, Munich and Sydney film festivals perhaps suggest people’s slight disappointment with Happy End. But maybe it’s just too bleak, or perhaps it isn’t Haneke’s turn this time.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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