Michael Haneke’s Happy End disappoints
Expectations were buzzing at Cannes for 75-year-old Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Happy End, with speculation that it might win him a third Golden Palm. However, the film pales in comparison with his Amour, which won the top prize in 2012.
Issued on: Modified:
Happy End feels like a sequel to Love, with euthanasia, loss, mourning and love, among the themes, but it is less tear-jerking and less engaging.
A teenage girl meets her 85-year-old grandfather for the second time in her life after her mother, his ex-daughter-in-law, has died. He is played by Jean-Louis Trintignant who played the husband of a paralysed wife (the late Emmanuelle Riva) in Amour.
The generation gap closes when life or death is at stake. Haneke again raises the question of the existence and nature of love among close relatives.
Grandpa and granddaughter form a tenuous bond. Cupboard love.
Isabelle Huppert plays the patriarch’s daughter. She’s a tough business woman with a sense of duty, who marries an English banker (Toby Jones). Viva the Channel tunnel! Her unstable son, wavers between a Shakespearian Hamlet character and a Martin von Essenbeck in Visconti's The Damned.
The film is set in the countryside of the south of France and the seascapes of the north coast around a photogenic historic family estate near Calais. The crux of the matter is the grandfather's longevity.
Haneke treats us to an 85th birthday party, complete with a live viol player in the salon, who happens to be the mistress of his unloving son (Matthieu Kassovitz).
During the daughter's wedding party, with his usual irony, Haneke treats us to a Happy End completing this family's life circle with the legacy of Amour.
Daily newsletterReceive essential international news every morning
Subscribe