Tedious ‘Happy End’ leaves out the drama
“Happy End” is the latest from Michael Haneke, an uncompromising filmmaker whose work is sometimes brilliant and sometimes hard to watch — and sometimes both, but not this time. “Happy End” is just hard to watch.
It’s a movie that seems to have been made with little regard for the fact that other human beings will have to sit through it. True, to his credit, Haneke does point his camera in the direction of the actors, but that’s his last concession to convention. Haneke, who also wrote the screenplay, takes material that might have been dramatic, and deliberately renders it stultifying, filming irrelevant scenes while skipping over any moment that might possibly interest somebody.
It’s the story of a wealthy industrialist family in the Normandy region of France. Dad ( Jean-Louis Trintignant) is 85 and painfully aware that he is slipping into dementia. His daughter, Anne (Isabelle Huppert), is running the company but is being undermined by her drunken son, Pierre (Franz Rogowski), who may be responsible for a workplace accident resulting in the death of a worker.
Meanwhile, one of the grandchildren, little darling Eve (Fantine Harduin), has just poisoned her mother, although no one knows it. Everyone thinks that Eve is a sweet little girl grieving over Mom’s irreversible coma.
So the point is, there is stuff going on here, more than enough to fill a 107-minute movie. Oh, but to make something entertaining out of all this, well, that would be socially irresponsible, or artistically ordinary, wouldn’t it? So we never see Mom getting poisoned, for example, but we do see little Eve packing a suitcase. Just packing. And packing some more. Then zipping up the suitcase. Then walking out of the room.
Nor do we see the old man attempt suicide in his car. That would be cheap. That would be typical. That might even, horror of horrors, be interesting to watch. Instead, we see him later, in a wheelchair, rolling down the street. He rolls down one block, then he wheels himself down another. And another. At the end of the street, he has a conversation with several men, but we don’t hear it. We have no idea what he’s saying.
Are you still there? The boring nature of this movie is having an impact on the review, so let’s just put it this way: It is actually possible to fall asleep during a shot, have an entire dream and wake up to find the same shot still going on. No, really, it’s easy. I’ve tried it.
At one point, the old man says, “Now I’m a captive of this damn chair with no hope of escape” — anticipating exactly how audiences will feel while watching the movie.
Here’s the shame of it. Trintignant is a great actor, and his depiction of dementia, in that particular middle stage where the consciousness and intelligence are still there but the memory and awareness are going, is haunting and precise. And Isabelle Huppert is quite interesting, or could have been, as the publicly adept businesswoman dealing with multiple problems simultaneously. Even Fantine Harduin, as the bantam Borgia, suggests a tumultuous, twisted inner life.
Yet having creating these fascinating characters , and cast his film with the best possible actors, Haneke gives them nothing to play. They just arrive on screen and exist. It’s not enough. It’s not drama. It’s not cinema. It’s an endurance test, and there’s no reason that anyone should take it.