A farce pitch-black, super bleak, and funny

Happy End

Michael Haneke has a nice sense of humour. This merits emphasizing not because his new film Happy End is his funniest — a farce, as he describes it, pitch-black and super bleak — but because the legions of imitators his work has inspired are almost uniformly humourless.

The Haneke technique is a tendency toward callous and, needless to say, facile provocation: all those cold, sombre little chamber pieces that clog the festival circuit, deadly serious and predictably sadistic, whose interminable stretches of meaningfully ambiguous stillness and silence are punctuated, as if on cue, by eruptions of violence most nauseating — those insufferable Eastern-European art house pictures in which men with moustaches stand still for 30 minutes before disembowelling a dog. His imitators retain the long takes and cruelty. What’s missing is the wit.

Of course this film contains every nasty flourish one expects of a Haneke picture called Happy End.

We begin with familiar agony: a child poisons first the family hamster and, soon after, her mother, broadcasting her attempted murder to the internet by way of a livestreaming app on her smartphone. (Shades of Benny’s Video, an early Haneke film about a boy who videotapes his atrocities.) The horror hardly relents. Construction accidents, adolescent suicides, pleas for euthanasia, beatings on the street, self-willed car crashes, broken bones: Happy End is rife with brutality, no one is spared.

When 10-year-old Eve (Fantine Harduin) admits to her octogenarian grandfather Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) that she nearly killed another little girl at summer camp, Georges simply wants to know if she regrets it — because he thinks she should rather not. He’s appraising the kid as a candidate to put him out of his misery. That’s life in a Michael Haneke movie: a wretched endless burden, with only harrowing surprises.

But as I say, it’s funny. Georges’s hapless efforts to find a way to end his life (first by his own hand, and when that fails, with the help of anyone willing, including a hairdresser) have the darkly comic bent of Blake Edwards or the late Jerry Lewis.

All the internet stuff, meanwhile, for which Haneke was obliged to faff about on Facebook and Snapchat for the sake of research, avoids narrowly the peril of out-of-touch moralism or an elder’s bemused finger-wagging; one senses Haneke is intrigued by the sea-change of social media mainly by its harmful effects, and his interest manifests as thought and care.

Playfulness prevails throughout Happy End. It reminds one that Haneke is nowhere near as grim or solemn as his reputation sometimes suggests, and that his art is infinitely more mischievous, teasing and loose than the lesser filmmakers descended from his legacy.

Long takes and cruelty: there is rather more to it than that, after all.