Happy End is an interesting film but difficult to enjoy and hard to get into. The barrier to admission is its deliberate disjointedness. Writer-director Michael Haneke composed a shattered mirror of the fractured perception of people in the postmodern world, buffeted by the minute with tweets, texts and the ability to surf a thousand channels without seeing a thing.
The subtitled French-language film opens through the narrow aperture of a sneaky cell phone camera as Eve (Faintine Harduin), 13, spies on an adult in the bathroom, texting nasty remarks. Next she trains her phone on her pet hamster, putting it to sleep with the pills her mother overdosed on. Eve comes to live with her father, Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz), and his well-meaning second wife Anais (Laura Verlinden). They are living in a sprawling mansion, waited on by live-in Moroccan servants, with Thomas’ hard-charging sister Anne (Isabelle Huppert), her sullen alcoholic son Pierre (Franz Rogowski) and the family patriarch, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), slipping at the edge of dementia.
The family secrets begin with the affair Thomas is having behind Anais’ back. Sharper than most of the adults she encounters, Eve hacks into dad’s computer after sniffing a hint of intrigue: we see his lurid, if not degrading sexual email on screen. And that’s only the beginning of what she learns.
Haneke (who earned an Oscar for Amour) has never flinched from dark content or challenging formats. The storyline in Happy End coalesces gradually from fragments; it’s less plot-driven than a study in emotional disconnection and lack of moral compass in a family whose wealth has failed to insure it from any problem save paying the bills. Their story plays out against surveillance camera video of a deadly accident at one of their workplaces and TV newscasts of a strike. Dejected African refugees hover at the edges.
The tricky thing about Happy End is its shifting point of view. We suspect Eve is bad seed, until we suspect that the whole hothouse family from whence she came is bad, until we come to see the good and the bad and the gray. There are no heroes, no one to root for. The film’s title is bitterly sardonic.
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