Happy End (2017)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Happy End (2017) – M. Haneke

Director Michael Haneke’s latest film, his first in five years, is a chilly look at the moral failings of the bourgeoisie (or perhaps the upper class).  Isabelle Huppert is the neurotic head of a construction company, hoping to bestow this role on her son, who she constantly berates for not being good enough (an accident at one of the sites heightens this tension).  Mathieu Kassovitz is her brother, a surgeon, whose 13-year-old daughter by a first marriage (Fantine Harduin) is suddenly added to the family when her mother attempts suicide; the daughter immediately senses that her father is having an affair (and investigates this on his computer; her smartphone is always near at hand, recording things).  Jean-Louis Trintignant (now in his 80s) plays the retired head of the family, alternatively forgetful and lucidly perceptive; he seeks escape in death after having euthanised his wife several years earlier during a chronic illness (a nod to Haneke’s previous feature, Amour, 2012).  There is no linear plot to reveal; we just see the family with its various players rolling through a series of events that show their obliviousness to the suffering of the world (made a bit more overt when the son invites a group of African refugees into a fancy engagement dinner).  We do feel the tension from these events but it is enhanced by the characters’ inability to communicate with each other, to confess their own true feelings or to recognise those of each other.  (Haneke uses some cinematic tricks, such as filming from a distance so that we cannot hear what is being said, to emphasise these failures). Our social pain may be even more acute when we observe the poor tween daughter and her own constricted emotions, clearly borne of the treatment received from those around her.  As always with Haneke, there are ideas to chew on here but they seem slightly less well digested than in some of his other films.