Haneke gives us his greatest hits
When a film starts with creepy, Facebook Live-style camera phone footage of a character who then spends the rest of it vegetatively swaddled in hospital bedsheets, most alert cinephiles could probably have a decent stab at the director. It’s not going to be Steven Spielberg.
No, Michael Haneke is back to many of his old tricks in Happy End, which enfolds the child psychopathy of Benny’s Video, the bourgeois nightmare of Hidden, the euthanasia theme of Amour, and the racial discomfort of Code Unknown, into a curious and sometimes insidiously effective greatest hits tableau.
Now 75, the Austrian auteur may not have repeated himself this much since his English-language remake of Funny Games in 2007, but self-plagiarism is the highest form of self-flattery, or something. The characters are an extended family of moneyed French haute-bourgeois types, headed by octogenarian Georges Laurent (Jean-louis Trintignant), who has passed his construction business on to his daughter Anne (Isabelle Huppert).
It’s a loose sequel to Amour, in which Georges also appears, and nods back to that film’s most controversial scenes, in which we saw Georges’s mercy killing of his wife. But now it’s Georges’s turn to wish upon himself an accelerated demise – for “Happy End”, think Dignitas – which he does at several points.
Meanwhile, the household is coping with the arrival back into their lives of 12-year-old Eve (Fantine Harduin), Anne’s niece, who is the smartphone owner from that first sequence, and responsible, we’re fairly sure, for putting her own mother into that coma with a drug overdose.
Her father, Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz), has a second wife and new baby, but we also find out that he’s having an affair, when sequences of red-hot online messaging between him and his mistress fill the screen.
On the whole, Haneke’s style is less cumulative and more detached than ever. The film steadfastly refuses to coalesce, as thesis, thriller, winking satire on European wealth, despairing family soap opera, or any of the modes it suggests. And this is not to say he even wants it to. It flits from teasing sequence to sequence asking us to notice things: pregnant clues which make their individual contributions to meaning and sink in slowly.
No one member of the Laurent clan claims a disproportionate share of our sympathy or attention, and Haneke often seems to be shooting them from as far away as possible, flagging up a moralistic distaste about their privilege, their oblivious damage. Huppert’s Anne is mostly exasperated and seeks shortcuts from responsibility. Thomas is caught in a flirtatious phone call by his daughter, who senses everything and knows which buttons to press.
This pretty but unnerving girl, with her strange fixation on poisoning people, is the most striking character and perhaps the closest thing to the film’s centre. Anyone who has read Agatha Christie’s novel Crooked House, which also features a 12-year-old girl spying on her household and an 85-year-old grandfather – a cantankerous entrepreneur, to boot – may wonder if Haneke took his inspiration from it.
Happy End is Haneke supplementing his old routines with a wilful refusal of ante-upping: if his career to date is a series of formidable chapters, here are the footnotes.