User Reviews

If the screenplay of 'Happy End' is an indication of Michael Haneke's view on the world, it is a very bleak one. There is no happy end to this film; in fact there is very little happiness whatsoever.

Haneke's portrayal of a French bourgeois family is extremely dark. The grandfather wants to kill himself, the son is exchanging kinky chat sessions with someone who is not his wife, the grandson is a spoiled brat with a low self-esteem, and the twelve year old granddaughter is an angel-faced scoundrel. Only Anne, the daughter who runs the family business, is relatively normal.

The film opens with homemade smartphone video images, followed by images from a surveillance camera. It's Haneke's way of keeping distance from his characters: he is merely the observer. This is also emphasized by several scenes in which the camera registers the events from a distance. It's all typical Haneke, as well as the elongated scenes in which not much happens. Haneke doesn't make it easy for the audience: in the first half of the film, the scenes don't really seem to be related, only after a while things become more clear.

In some films by Haneke, these style elements work well and add value to the story. But in 'Happy End', it feels like they have become Haneke trademarks just for the sake of it. They're not drawing the viewer into the film but instead creating a barrier, preventing a full appreciation of it.

Still, if you're ready to get over some cinematographic hurdles, this can be a very rewarding film. Perhaps some elements are a bit too much, but at least it doesn't leave you indifferent.

I'm a fan of Michael Haneke, so I was looking forward to his latest film. From his previous films and now this one, he is clearly a filmmaker interested in surveillance; the film opens and closes with shots from a phone screen surveying 'crime' in one way or another. A filmmaker also concerned with social issues, this film is about a disjointed family in crisis with a backdrop of the European refugee crisis. Join that with the modern way to keep everyone 'connected' with technology (social media or smartphones) you can perhaps read what Haneke is trying to say about European Identity. There are a lot of scenes that drag and the narrative is unfortunately disconnected forcing the audience to join dots so 'Happy End' had the potential to be a lot more.

Hands down, Happy End wins the Most Ironic Title of the year award. (Runner-up: "President Trump.") From Amour Haneke continues Trintignant's role as the octogenarian who lovingly cared for his ailing wife and helped her out - with Huppert as their callous businesswoman daughter. But it's from Cache that Haneke mainly draws, extending his anatomy of the privileged white business class cut off from emotional engagement, experiencing the world and relating primarily through media, and their insensitivity to the burgeoning immigrant underclass. The Callais setting is key. It's the bridge between France and England, both in starting the Chunnel and remarking England's last foothold in France. It's also the entry point for African immigrants hoping to continue on to England. Or to the French bourgeoisie? The dysfunctional Laurents represent the privileged society which the desperate immigrants aspire to join. The family's concerns pale beside what we see of the their Moroccan servants ("our slave" Pierre publically calls cook Jamila), the street lads Georges assumes he can hire to kill him, the older immigrants Pierre exploits to embarrass his mother at her posh engagement dinner, the construction worker killed in an accident, his whose family the Laurents further affront. In addition to the immigrants, the family is viewed from the perspective of Eve, Thomas's 12-year-old daughter who comes to live with the Laurents after her mother's mysterious poisoning and death. For this Eve there is no Eden, only a family of anger and mutual abuse. The film's central theme is the family's detachment from each other. The film opens and closes with Eve's cellphone films. This characterizes her as distanced, relating to her family indirectly, through media. The pre-title sequence records her mother's nightly ablution rite before she turns the lights off, an augur of her suicide. Then a young boy cavorts in silly cheek, showing Eve as cool and detached from her friends as she is from her mother. The last shot is of her Aunt Anne and father Thomas rushing to save George from contentedly drowning in the sea. The thin column of cellphone film is a mediated experience. So, too, are the computer screen messages between Thomas and his mistress Claire. Several key scenes are kept in long shot, Pierre's provoking of the accident victim's son. That device keeps us in the characters' detachment from the experience. Bent upon suicide, the grandfather wheels down the city street in the road, between the roaring traffic and the parked cars. In one scene the foreground is dominated by a violently barking dog. In the background we barely see the key content of the scene: Georges brought home from the hospital, in his new wheelchair. The composition leaves us uncertain. Is the dog attacking the "stranger" or straining to greet his master? And whose dog is it? We never see a family member with the dog, and Annes ordering servant Rachid to control the dog could suggest the dog is their pet, not hers. But then he bites their little daughter at play. The dog may well be the Laurents' pet, as neglected and antagonistic as the family members themselves. We're not told which. Just as the narrative omits significant details, like the cause of Eve's mother's death, the details of the Laurents' financial predicament, how the new father Thomas fell into another affair, etc. Perhaps the film's most touching scene is the grandfather's with Eve. To coax her into explaining her suicide attempt he confesses that he put his beloved wife out of her suffering. But, as her cellphone filing suggests, the girl is too dissociated from her own emotions and too remote from others to be as open and intimate as he is. Whether in lethargy, resignation or obedience, she wheels him toward the water and eaves him there. Even his possible death does not shake her detachment. Earlier Georges told her how disturbing he found the spectacle of a predatory bird tearing apart a smaller one, both then wiped away by a car. His point is how reality is even more jolting than its mediated images are. But when she watches his suicide she again resists the direct emotional encounter - and films it. The forgetful old man eager to die is the film's emotional and moral center. His family is relentlessly abrasvive. His son Thomas left his first wife and seems poised to leave his second for Claire, his unseen email mistress. He struggles to be a father for Eve. Grandson Pierre is an incompetent misfit who blames his mother for his own failure. Nor is there much passion and fulfilment in Anne's life. Her fiancé is the unappealing English lawyer who has been negotiating a large loan to rescue her company. This seems the traditional expedience rather than passion. Confirming this rotting and wasteful society, the dialogue abounds with references to urinating. Eve records her mother's pissing and flush. The email love letters relish the memory of golden showers, the mutual debasement may confirm Eve's sense that her father doesn't love this Claire, didn't love either wife and probably cannot love her either. Perhaps the film's central metaphor is the accident on their construction site. A worker is killed when he goes into a stored portable toilet to urinate and the ground crumbles under him. When a construction site provides such a bathetic destruction the company, the family, the society, seem of very unstable grounding,. Perhaps "Happy End" isn't so ironic after all. If Georges does manage to drown before his son and daughter save him, in this family he could ask for nothing better. In any case, Eve remains the continuing victim of a broken adult world she can neither understand nor enter with confidence or commitment.

The is the first time I have seen a movie from this director and though I had trouble getting into it at the beginning, it was well worth it sitting through the first part.

The movie is nothing but depressing and has no happy ending with the story of a french family of wealth and standing demonstrating how seriously screwed up you can be.

I found the cuts between scene's annoying in some places with the previous scene introducing an event ever so briefly, for it not to happen or relate to the next scene or referred to again.

In someways the movie was too long with too many scene's used to make a longer movie.

With all this said it is though well worth seeing, with the final scene a cracker!

I have seen some wonderful films recently such as "Three Billboards....", "The Shape of Water" etc that I really enjoyed. Then you see a film by a master like Haneke and suddenly you are transported to a whole new level of film making. This is a film that intellectually and visually provides a commentary on the state of the world at the moment. Haneke is a sort of Noam Chomsky for the eyes but as the supreme moral chronicler his world view has a satisfyingly more muscular and biting edge to it. Indeed Haneke operates on an intellectual and moral level that very few filmmakers have ever approached. Only a handful of films such as Godard's "Weekend" ( although Godard can never escape a blatant didacticism, or a frequent obsession with his leading ladies), Greenaway's "The Cook, the Thief His Wife and Her Lover" and Bunuel's "the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" provide such a pleasure for the senses and the brain as Haneke's work does..

The film launches you into the various machinations of a construction company owning upper middle class family. Sexualised internet messages from people having affairs, phone camera's voyeuristically recording someone's mother as she passes from intimate daily routines through to the anonymous and almost impersonalised death throes of the character. These moments are designed to actively engage your brain right from the outset as you start to try and construct the narrative gaps. However they also serve, mirroring Haneke's 1992 film "Benny's Video", to show the distancing effect of technology on real human interaction and the almost sociopathic impact that this technology has on people's minds.

The film places us at the centre of a successful, cultured and beautiful family headed by a grandfather sinking towards dementia, brilliantly played by Jean Louis Trintignant who at 87 may have delivered here his greatest performance since the "Conformist". As we move behind this facade we see a son, played by Mathieu Kassovitz , who is a care giving doctor in his daily life but someone who does not know how to love or give genuine care to his own family, a man who is at his most alive typing out his sexual fantasies on facebook messenger. There is an austere daughter, played by the greatest screen actress of her generation Isabelle Huppert, who is the cold steel holding the family construction business together. There is the troubled grandson, Huppert's son, played by Franz Rogowski, physically imperfect and hence doomed to failure. Then there is the sweet looking granddaughter, brilliantly played Fantine Harduin, who delivers an astonishing performance for a 12 year old, who has been so tainted by this dysfunctional family and by the her constant reliance upon a version of life that is one step removed from reality by her phone video camera that she can barely grasp the fundamental morals of reality. Yet tragically all that she wants is to be loved and to belong.

There are the house servants of North African origin and the mongrel family dog, always filmed from the outside looking in and reduced to taking it's frustration out on the lowest ranking member of the household, the cooks daughter. Perhaps representing a world where the disenfranchised have their hatred misdirected to other struggling people rather than focussing upon those who are really responsible for their difficulties.

This is a living breathing world trapped inside the problems of the current day. Where migrants are forced to leave their homes, not for economic reasons but because their family members have been burnt alive by fundamentalist Muslims, Muslim extremists funded by Trump's fossil fuel buddies the Saudi Arabians and subtly referenced by the oil rigs shown in the film. A time and place where the simple physical presence of these dark skinned people at a gleaming white wedding serves to show the profound contrast in these people's lives. A world where Brexit is serving to disrupt the relationship between England and France (hence the inclusion of the English speaking character played by Toby Jones). A world where everything is contractual and where an ordinary working man's life is worth 35,000 Euro's and the compensation for a dog bite on a North African child is the remnants of a box of chocolates.

A brilliantly crafted film where every second seems to be perfectly judged, from intimate interiors to a terrific exterior tracking shot of the suicidal family patriarch, but keeping us as distanced observers, inviting us to actually THINK not consume. A film where every interior, every wardrobe choice seems to be casually perfect. Inside this coruscating study of an upper middle class family Mr Haneke has produced a time capsule of the difficulties of living in a world where the richest 1% have as much wealth as the next 99% of people of the world and where the news media and impersonalising, isolating influence of social media drives us to misunderstand issues and to hate the rest of the 99%. A film with a happy ending for one of the characters, and one that I have to say I found highly amusing, and an ending that reinforces that the rich can literally get away with murder.