Happy End (Michael Haneke, 2017)

A curious beast, this. As a number of critics have said, all the expected Haneke manoeuvres are present and correct, but rather too present and correct. (A bit like "Haneke's greatest hits", somebody said to me.) The filming is as beautifully meticulous as ever, but I was also pedantically irritated by the opening cameraphone shots, which show us the entire screen of the young daughter's smartphone, with running commentary in text message but nary a thumb to be seen. How exactly is she supposed to be typing the messages, then?!? Fantine Harduin as the 13-year old Eve is in fact one of the best things about the film – understated but not quite pathologically so – and Trintignant gives a wryly precise performance; Huppert and Toby Jones, watchable as they both are, are never required to break a sweat. But my general impression during the film was largely one of Haneke spinning his wheels. And yet when it closed on an overtly comic treatment of attempted suicide I found myself reconsidering. It is made clear, earlier on, that the film is in some senses a sequel to Amour, but the comedy (which surfaces intermittently throughout) made me reconsider the other references to Haneke's own work. What had seemed worryingly derivative (clichés are clichés, even if they're your own – just look at Tarkovsky's last two films) now seemed so blatant as to be clearly deliberate: there is, for example, a conversation in the middle distance that we can't hear and a sudden, shocking eruption of violence (conflating two scenes from Caché), and a woman involved in a sadomasochistic affair turns out to be a musician (The Piano Teacher). Is this latter fact an actual joke? Seeing reflexivity rather than mere repetition also caused me to reconsider the film's relative gentleness, which some have seen as bland or disappointing; horrible events are telegraphed but do not happen, and two excruciating social situations are only mildly excruciating. Is this, too, to be seen in relation to Haneke's preceding films, a comment on his own method? Is it deliberate bathos rather than a failed attempt at intensity? Is the whole thing poking fun at his own body of work, at the notion that film is an appropriate means for a traumatic working through of hypocrisy? Does this explain why the migrant crisis is quite so peripheral to the film, as well as the crudeness of its one major appearance in the narrative? Is Haneke, perhaps, satirising his own bourgeois filmmaking here as much as the bourgeousie in general? After just one viewing, I'm not at all sure, but Haneke is surely far too intelligent not to have considered all this, and so it definitely merits a subsequent viewing (something I didn't think I'd say half way through) and some more pondering.

6/12/17

P.S. Interesting remark by Haneke in an interview in Cineaste (Winter 2017, pp. 4-9: 4).

"Nasty commentators have said this is a "best of" compilation of my work. It is, in fact, a kind of summation. It also has something comical - in the sense of a farce - which makes it easy to reference other films. That was fun. This gets noticed only by insiders. They get the jokes that, nevertheless, don't change the seriousness of the narrative."

8/12/17