Michael Haneke 2017 France/Austria
Starring: Fantine Harduin, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Isabelle Huppert, Mathieu Kassovitz, Franz Rogowski, Laura Verlinden, Toby Jones
That Michael Haneke's latest film is forensic and wildly pessimistic may not be a surprise. That said film is also a shockingly modernist comedy with the frankly optimistic title of Happy End and opens with the eyes of the main character replaced by the proxy of a camera phone spying on a woman going through her nightly routine of ablutions, the accompanying dialogue appearing on screen in the form of a series of texts, will almost certainly be unexpected. Likewise that the 12 year old behind the camera, Fantine Harduin's Eve, then films her hamster eating feed laced with her mother's antidepressants "to see what happens" sounds like it could have come straight from Benny's Video. The commentary, again by text to a never revealed recipient (perhaps live updates on a blog or YouTube channel of some sort), talks about how unhappy "she" is and for a moment it's unclear if "she" is the hamster out of its mind on Sertraline or Eve's mother, only shown through an emoji spattered screen. The hint that the former may have been a dry-run for the incident that launches the film's story frankly feels further towards gallows humour than Haneke or many directors would be comfortable with. Also despite the genuinely legendary cast Haneke has assembled for what is defiantly an actor's drama regardless of its lack of chat, it's far less even-handed than his past work. Here Eve is the main character, somewhere between too smart for her own good and genuinely psychopathic, and Harduin gives the towering central performance with the established superstars Huppert and Trintignant as admittedly brilliant support fleshing out the story as Eve is removed from her normal life and transplanted into the middle-class household of her parently baffled father Thomas (Kassovitz), a philandering doctor somehow successful in every walk of life despite being about as smooth as Swarfega; her cold, organized aunt Anne (Huppert), head of the family company and dealing with a workplace accident that has caused the death of a working-class employee with steely style; her volatile, desolate, rapidly destructing adult cousin Pierre (Rogowski); and her suicidal grandfather Georges (Trintignant in his 87th year and coming out of retirement for Haneke again), a dyed in the wool patriarch suffering the early stages of dementia and apparently declared too healthy for Zurich. Also on board is an underused Toby Jones as Lawrence, Anne's English lawyer and sometime boyfriend. They all communicate for the most part electronically; Eve with her unidentified, perhaps wished for online friends; Thomas exchanging sexual depravities with his mistress; Anne and Lawrence linked only by cross-Europe phone calls. The only pair who really talk are Eve and Georges, at first with him inquiring how old she is - an indicator of the fact that he hasn't seen her since she was 3 as much as his depleting faculties - then welcoming her to "the club" before moving into late, brutally stark conversations about death and their past misdeeds (although no judgments are offered so misdeeds may be the wrong word). They seem to have an understanding as Georges tells her how seeing a bird torn apart by a predator in the garden, its feathers flying like it was snowing, caused his hands to shake while he found a similar scene poetic on a TV documentary. A skewering of the modern world isn't difficult to read although when, mid-film, the family have a day at the beach, the lingering gazes on gorgeous bodies and fleeting glimpses of Calippos bring to mind the Greek New Wave's lust and lack of understand more than the normally muted shades of grey synonymous with Haneke's theatre of cruelty. Harduin is utterly believable and worryingly intense throughout, particularly in the scene where she suddenly, momentarily breaks down in front of her father but remains more in control of the situation than him, another where faced with her ailing mother she can only glance back bored by it all and the best moments of the film late on with Trintignant. She found early fame with a mentalism act on Belgium's Got Talent and she often appears almost hypnotised, emotion gradually pushing its way out of her frame through single tears and harsh words cracking her resolve. Everyone is excellent but the only scene that truly matches her is Rogowski, drunk out of his mind and in the midst of a simultaneously ferocious and crumpled karaoke session. A nice counterpoint is provided when a violinist performs at a family party, violently gesticulating as she goes, her movements far less frightful and hideous because they're socially acceptable (at least in the world of the characters). Another typical nuance occurs in the traces of racism when Trintignant attempts escape for the umpteenth time, wheeling himself down the pavement and flagging down a group of young black men to ask directions only for a middle-aged white man to cautiously intervene because he has misread the situation spectacularly and can't imagine it can be happening any other way. A reference to a dead sibling being floated as the start of Eve's disconnection however feels tacked on, melodramatic and in the end never important enough to be elaborated on. The silent passing of time is treated more delicately, portrayed as ultimately unimportant as everything else in perhaps the most despondent film Haneke has made since his debut.
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