Michael Haneke (2017)
No other living director that I know uses the camera with quite Michael Haneke’s authority and self-awareness. Happy End (which shares its name with the Brecht-Weill musical of 1929 and a South Korean film of seventy years later) begins with video clips on a smartphone, then moves to a security camera that records an accident on a building site, before Haneke’s own perspective takes over. The smartphone video, accompanied by a voiceover, appears to record how the girl speaking to us has tried to kill her mother – who, she complains, is concerned only with herself. The girl’s calm, startling lack of emotion introduces the director’s own. Haneke often seems to be secretly observing and assessing his characters – they are weighed in the balance and, not unusually, found wanting. That’s certainly the case in Happy End. The press kit announces as much in an epigraph – ‘All around us, the world, and we, in its midst, blind’ – and summarises the film as ‘A snapshot from the life of a bourgeois European family’. Two members of that family more or less avoid Haneke’s censure. One is the matricidal young teen, whose name is Eve (Fantine Harduin). The other, at the opposite end of the age scale, is Eve’s grandfather (Jean-Louis Trintignant).
With her mother Nathalie (Aurélia Petit) comatose in hospital (where she dies without recovering consciousness), Eve is sent to stay in her grandfather’s large house in Calais, where the events of Happy End bring the two of them closer together. We already knew from the opening smartphone footage that Eve had experimented on her pet hamster before slipping her mother an overdose of sleeping tablets. It transpires the girl also has form from longer ago. She tells her grandfather that, as a younger child, she went to youth camp and administered sedatives that she’d been prescribed to another girl at the camp, whom she didn’t like. (This overdose wasn’t fatal but Eve was sent home under a cloud.) Her grandfather, like most of Haneke’s male protagonists, is called Georges. As usual when the principals are French, the family name is Laurent. This particular Georges Laurent connects with a predecessor more fully than before. In response to Eve’s revelation about youth camp, Georges describes to her the terrible terminal illness of his late wife and how he ended it by smothering her to death. An exactly similar act of mercy killing is the climax to Haneke’s previous film, Amour (2012).
The Georges Laurent whom Jean-Louis Trintignant played in Amour is not, though, the Georges Laurent he plays in Happy End. In the earlier film, Georges and his wife Anne (the usual name of Haneke’s leading lady) were retired classical piano teachers. In this one, Georges is the patriarch of a family construction business, which his daughter Anne (Isabelle Huppert) now runs. The main characters’ line of work evidently makes a big difference to how Haneke treats them. A couple who had spent their lives making music brought out in him an unaccustomed (though unsentimental) sympathy. The Laurents, who have been making money for at least two generations, are less kindly handled. It’s hard for them to scrub off the stain of private enterprise. Georges’s son (and Eve’s father) Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz), although a hospital doctor, is more conspicuously a serial adulterer: he’s now cheating – with a cellist (Loubna Abidar)! – on his second wife Anaïs (Laura Verlinden) and their baby son. Anne’s son Pierre (Franz Rogowski), putative heir to the Laurents’ firm, eventually avoids his inheritance – not as a consequence of moral superiority but because he’s unfit for the job.
Happy End begins with what’s assumed by the adult characters to be a suicide attempt by Eve’s mother and ends with a suicide attempt by Georges, assisted by Eve – both of whom have tried to take their own life in the meantime. Eve swallows the sedatives unused on the hamster and her mother but survives. The reliably evasive Thomas asks his father to talk with her to find out why she took the pills – even though Eve has already told Thomas, from a hospital bed, that it was because of his latest affair. Her disclosure about the youth camp is part of the resulting conversation. Georges’s campaign is more sustained and resourceful, and repeatedly frustrated. He leaves the house one night and drives his car into a tree: the resulting bone fractures put him in a wheelchair so he turns to others for help. He wheels himself along the street and proposes to a puzzled group of young men that they finish him off, in exchange for his expensive watch. After explaining that he was refused euthanasia in Zurich (‘Seems I’m too healthy’), Georges asks his barber (Dominique Besnehard) to obtain a lethal weapon or suitable medication. The barber, appalled, says no. (He’s so appalled that he does a poor job of cutting Georges’s hair.)
The last part of the film takes place at a beach restaurant, where the family and their many guests are celebrating Anne’s engagement to Lawrence Bradshaw (Toby Jones), a British lawyer who has helped sort out the Laurents’ business difficulties. The event is interrupted, to the embarrassment of all concerned, by Pierre, who arrives with a few inhabitants of the Calais Jungle in tow and makes a speech introducing these have-nots to the affluent gathering:
‘This is Mohammed. He’s from Nigeria. His wife and two children were burnt to death in a punishment killing by Boku Haram. He took a year to get here, and now he’s been trekking out of the jungle to the tunnel every day for months in the hope of finally getting a ride …’
Pierre’s intervention is a more theatrical follow-up to a remark he made at an earlier social event, referring to the Laurents’ maid Jamila (Nabiha Akkari) as ‘our Moroccan slave’. His outburst of social conscience amounts to biting the hand that feeds him; his mother puts an end to it by grasping Pierre’s own hand and breaking one of his fingers. Georges meanwhile takes advantage of the distraction Pierre has caused. He asks Eve to wheel him outside and push him down a slipway towards the sea. At the edge of the water, Georges continues to wheel himself forward. At this point, the point of view reverts to that of Eve’s smartphone. With Georges submerged up to his neck, Anne and Thomas appear on the scene and run towards him, Anne giving Eve en route a look that could kill. We don’t find out if Georges’s children arrive in time to thwart the happy end their father has very nearly achieved.
Haneke’s treatment of the elderly couple in Amour marked a distinct departure from previous films. Happy End is a case of normal misanthropic service being resumed, though the tone is lighter than before. Haneke is coolly contemptuous here: it’s as if he feels the Laurents don’t deserve even his severity. (Something of the same kind occurred in later Buñuel; his disparagement of the bourgeoisie became less savage, more effortlessly derisive.) The sharp contrast between this new film and its predecessor has naturally provoked sharp differences in critical opinion between those who welcomed Amour as a sign of compassion on Haneke’s part and those who were disappointed by its relative softness. In the former camp, Adam Mars Jones, in his negative review of Happy End in the TLS, regrets that Amour now ‘seems more of a one-off than ever’. Adam Nayman in Sight & Sound, on the other hand, is relieved: Amour had made him feel he never wanted to see another Haneke. Overall, the critical reception for Happy End has been markedly less enthusiastic than for Amour or The White Ribbon or Hidden. There’s a widespread view that a critique of middle-class values by now comes too easily to Haneke.
The criticism isn’t unjustified. This film sometimes has the flavour of a greatest hits compilation – an unknown (though not for long, this time) correspondent echoes Hidden, the brutal behaviour of children who have been taught by adult masters evokes The White Ribbon. Adam Mars Jones describes Happy End as ‘underwritten and lazy’, pointing out clichés such as the deathly silence of formal family meals in Georges’s mansion. I agree it’s too simple to imply, as the film does, that emotional coldness is a function of privilege – and Haneke makes life easy for himself by gathering the various generations of the family under the same roof and by including references to rather than illustrations of Georges’s supposed dementia. Yet the viewer’s sense that Haneke is coasting is also, I think, a consequence of technique – a technique which he is master enough to make look easy. This can have a dual effect: the meticulous compositions reflect the heartlessness of the people on screen while raising the suspicion that the man behind the camera shares this quality. There’s an early sequence in which Anne is driving towards the Eurotunnel in Calais, when she receives a phone call about the accident on the building site and learns of the serious injuries sustained by a worker there. She reacts irritably to the news – another work problem for her to sort out. Successive shots emphasise how smoothly her car handles the road ahead and how oblivious she is to the figures of black refugees behind the fence bordering the motorway. These shots convey a sense of streamlined efficiency shared by Anne’s motor, Anne herself and Michael Haneke.
In a much later episode, Selin (Joud Geistlich), the daughter of Jamila and her husband Rashid (Hassam Ghancy), who also works for the family, has been bitten on the leg by the Laurents’ dog. Enter Thomas and Anne. He examines the patient and writes a prescription for an anti-inflammatory cream. Anne gives Selin a box of chocolates – an apparent kindness that is soon revealed to be a formality, as Anne reverts to her usual efficient manner. (After telling Selin that ‘Every time it hurts a bit, you can have a chocolate – then the pain will go away’, Anne sharply reminds Rachid that ‘You’ll need to keep the animal better under control’.) The cinematographer Christian Berger perfectly coordinates the orange colours of Selin’s flesh wound, the shirt Anne is wearing and the chocolate-box lid. Here too, the precision is almost elating yet alienating too – and the feelings of alienation are directed against the director as well as the character. Are the black men whom Anne ignores at the start the same black men whom Georges asks to kill him and whom Pierre brings as gatecrashers to his mother’s engagement party? Having to ask that question perhaps proves I wasn’t paying attention to these men as individuals and concentrated each time on the white people with whom they briefly share the screen, but the camerawork encourages the viewer to do just that. And if he means us to take seriously Pierre’s speech on behalf of the refugees, Haneke fails: thanks to his strongly negative characterisation of Pierre, the latter’s words at the party are circumscribed, and their force weakened, by his petulant inadequacy.
In a visually remarkable sequence about halfway through, Pierre drives out to a suburban apartment block from which a young man emerges. After a brief exchange of words, he strikes Pierre, knocking him to the ground. (A later scene makes clear the young man is the son of the badly injured construction worker.) The camera observes the altercation from a distance and tantalisingly: we can neither hear the characters’ words nor properly see their faces. Haneke seems almost amused by making us aware of our curiosity, by frustrating it and by pretending that he can’t get any closer to the action. Once Pierre has picked himself up and makes his way painfully back to his car, Haneke makes it clear he was only pretending: as Pierre walks towards the camera, the camera moves towards him. The wheelchair outing that culminates in Georges’s fruitless proposition to the young black men isn’t dissimilar. Again, the camera keeps its distance as it watches the wheelchair’s progress along the street: passing juggernaut lorries intermittently block out the sight of Georges but he presses on regardless. Both these sequences are Haneke showing off. Because they are, compared with most ‘virtuoso’ displays by present-day directors, so ingenious and purposeful, it’s hard to object too strongly.
Hardly surprising, in view of the way the narrative develops, that Jean-Louis Trintignant and Fantine Harduin increasingly stand out in the expert cast. Georges has his eighty-fifth birthday in the course of the story; Trintignant has his eighty-seventh this month but his acting remains wonderfully incisive. Harduin’s delicate features and quiet presence complement most effectively her character’s wilful anger. Whether there’s any deeper significance to Haneke’s relatively sympathetic handling of the oldest and (except for Eve’s baby brother) youngest characters in Happy End, I’m not sure. It’s difficult to see them as kindred spirits: even if Georges is on the verge of second childhood, Eve has already left her first. The casting creates some interesting family resemblances that you don’t initially expect. At certain angles, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Mathieu Kassovitz are very credibly father and son. It’s no less credible – and it’s intriguing – that Eve might grow up to resemble her aunt Anne, and Fantine Harduin shares with Isabelle Huppert a naturally businesslike quality. I booked to see Happy End in a special preview, including a Q&A with Haneke, at BFI but was ill on the day and ended up watching it on Curzon Home Cinema. On our modest-sized television screen, the subtitles – especially when they were explaining phone texts or emails, as they often did – were in punishingly small font. Peering at these reinforced the sense you often get at a Haneke picture of being engaged in detective work. The sense persists nearly throughout Happy End but you may feel eventually that you’ve not discovered much more than you knew at the start: the writer-director tends not to like people unless they’re seriously disadvantaged. Even so, the film is absorbing. Minor Michael Haneke beats major most other movie-makers.
3 December 2017
