MAKING LIGHT WORK OF BRUTALITY
Michael Haneke’s playful touch saves Happy End from pitch blackness
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, pitchblack 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 facile provocation: all those cold, sombre little chamber pieces that continue to clog the festival circuit, deadly serious and predictably sadistic, whose interminable stretches of meaningfully ambiguous stillness and silence are punctuated by periodic eruptions of nauseating violence — those insufferable Eastern European art-house pictures in which men with moustaches stand still for 30 minutes before graphically disembowelling a dog. His imitators retain the long takes and cruelty that are hallmarks of Haneke’s style.
But what’s missing from the imitators is Haneke’s 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 on the internet by way of a live-streaming app on her smartphone. (Shades of Benny’s Video, an early Haneke film about a boy who videotapes his atrocities.)
The horror hardly relents from here. Construction accidents, adolescent suicides, pleas for euthanasia, beatings on the street, self-willed car crashes, broken bones: Happy End is rife with brutality, and no one is spared.
When 10-year-old Eve (Fantine Harduin) admits to her octogenarian grandfather Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant, returning from Amour) 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 prospective candidate to put him out of his misery. That’s life in a Haneke movie: a wretched endless burden, with only harrowing surprises. But, 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 goof around on Facebook and Snapchat for the sake of research, avoids narrowly the peril of out-of-touch moralism or an elder’s bemused fingerwagging.
Playfulness is the register that prevails throughout Happy End, a reminder 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 many lesser filmmakers who have descended from his legacy.
Long takes and cruelty: there is more to it than that, after all.