On Michael Haneke’s HAPPY END

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Not a conventional story, but a keen observation of human conditions and relations… Not a tragic, gloomy piece on disorderly world today, but a biting, playful requiem of living… For these reasons, Haneke’s new film, HAPPY END, does not connect to most of the people…

This time, once again, Haneke does not attempt to define the lack of the relations with an incomprehensible, indigestible interpretation of a word like LOVE, but delivers an apparently incoherent text to have more time to focus on his big tableau of contemporary life.

The film mentions that it follows up the characters from LOVE, but it does not help a little bit since HAPPY END is a completely different film – even in some parts witty and funny.

It portrays three generations in a family. The grandfather (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a remaining member of a generation who witnessed the big crimes and survived the big wars. Full of hatred towards living in the days of inability and oldness, he tries to convince everyone that the only deservedly act is to help him to get rid of this still life – as once he did it to help his wife.

The father (Mathieu Kassovitz) and the mother (Isabelle Huppert), the son and the daughter of the grandfather, are the adult generation who desperately and constantly try to show that they have control over everything. Coming from a generation lacking big experiences and referring to a few days of protesting on the streets in Paris as the second big revolution, they are incapable to have control even on the smallest things in their personal lives – more subtly in their troubled relations as single parents to their children and their meaningless search for a new love. Ignorant to the real side of living, the grandchildren, each, have found their own way of escaping the truth and choosing a response to their conditions – one with the pretentious humanistic activities with no sympathy and the other with altering anything to an object seen through a mobile.

Looking for an assisting hand for killing himself, after some witty conversations, at last he comes to terms with his granddaughter who finds it an interesting subject to be recorded on her mobile…

It seems that in a nightmarish black comedy, Haneke succeeds in painting his tableau with some still shots, composed simply and unsophisticatedly, and usually defined with minimal actions. Thus the actors are firstly some models for his paintings, and when one overacts (like Huppert), the visual subtleties are sacrificed. This way Haneke manages to indicate the lack of the relations of the individuals and the others through imagery. For instance, the granddaughter is solely characterized only through the imagery. When she beholds the world through the camera of her mobile in the opening, she is depicted as a witty passive, motionless observer of the repetitive details of everyday life, but among the others, she seems completely disconnected from everyone and everything. The film is undoubtedly enhanced by her encounters with her father and grandfather – despite the director’s direct criticism of a mobile-dependent generation trying to define itself in a virtual world without knowing anything about their world and obsessions.

On Sergey Loznitsa’s A GENTLE WOMAN

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Following its central character in a nightmarish strange castle, Sergey Loznitsa’s A GENTLE WOMAN could be easily associated with Kafka’s works, but it is not Kafkesque at all. In his new film, Loznitsa steps into a new world. Portraying an alienated woman, stepping into this new world, he takes a semi-Bunuelian turn to focus on the nightmare wittily. So the film playfully and funnily portrays all the characters surrounding the gentle woman in the ongoing, horrible dream – a nightmare formed out of the dark world of the shadows and in the broad daylight.

At first, she is portrayed in full peace and harmony with the nature when there is no other human being around. But when she attempts once again to take a break and take a package to her husband in a far, faraway prison, she turns into a speechless alien in a pathetic circus. The clowns are the officers examining the objects inside the boxes both in the station and the prison, the convicted behind the bars and the people living all around the prison – however they would be able to turn into wild beasts whenever there is no one else around but the gentle woman. When she is not allowed to deliver the package to her husband, she tries anything decent to get this little chance. When there is no way, she is obliged to begin a silent protest. When she finds out she is living her own nightmares, she surrenders to the other peoples’ obsessions.

In “Exercice du Scénario” (by Jean-Claude Carrière and Pascal Bonitzer), only one rule is set for screenwriting: never show that everything happened is just the dream of a character. But then, Carrière remembers that he had done it in Bunuel’s LE CHARME DISCRET DE LA BOURGEOISIE and it had proved to work out well. In A GENTLE WOMAN, Loznitsa does the same thing to show how the heroine comes to know that she is destined to follow the others’ wills and obsessions. This way Loznitsa builds up a woman character living simply, entering a patriarchal world, attempting to observe her rights and meaning of freedom eventually and surrendering to misuse and abuse.

To proceed with this, Loznitsa sets out on a personal journey into the world of imagery. Portraying the woman in the nature with auteuristic flavor, in the station and prison with a satirical approach to bureaucracy, in the unknown town with its existential references and in the wild circus of the nightmare, Loznitsa succeeds to create a group portrait with the gentle lady whenever the other people are involved. After the opening in the way to the cottage, the film reflects her difference with the others as well as her inability to connect to the surroundings in non-action of the silent lady. In Lozanitsa’a visual feast, the words weaken the film – the words that make the film too long and the final nightmare too far.

On Andrey Zvyagintsev’s LOVELESS

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In THE WHITE RIBBON (2009), Michael Haneke pictures a little community, obsessed with ultraviolent actions, to show that when the violence reigns, the war is inevitable. If the allegory is forgotten and the audience follows a drama, the main notion is completely ignored since there are no powerful characters and dazzling complications to entertain the viewers. The film works in its depiction of violence and follies of the people.

In LOVELESS (2017), Andrey Zvyagintsev depicts a loveless society to indicate how a big war begins when there is no love and hearts are not open. Instead of focusing merely on the allegory, the director tries to build up a drama with concrete characters, trapped in their personal obsessions for starting a new life and ignoring everyone and everything surrounding them. Thus it is the lack of relation to surrounding people and objects make the life too meaningless and the outbreak of war so close.

To achieve this, Zvyagintsev relies on the images as the main film words. When a kid finds out that in a loveless world, his parents are going to get a divorce, he will be afflicted. Then the director decides to portray the affliction through one image rather than unceasing flow of the words. The image of the boy, hiding behind the door and weeping silently, recalls the best of the Bergmanian shots and is easily engraved in the cinematic memories. Meanwhile the visual structure of the film, emphasizing on the lack of relation from the very first moment, reflects the magic of the movies on the silver screen once again.

Even before the disappearance of the kid and the start of the action for desperately seeking him, the director makes a vital decision to create the world of the film. Once in an interview, Francis Ford Coppola mentioned that he had decided to shoot a family in the park, strolling in the beautiful shots, and then, when the kid is missing and everybody is searching, the absorbing nature turns into the labyrinths of horror. Zvyagintsev does not choose the same way as he does not focus on the relativity, but on the portrayal of a loveless world on the brink of a horrible war. Therefore the nature is also shown as hostile as it is ever painted. Trees are dim, frozen figures and byways are led into the fog and the darkness. The interaction between the shots joined to each other is a formalistic venture to create the atmosphere. So the rhythm is also created, not verbally, but visually. Suffering from living in a loveless world, the kid even tries to relate to the nature which is the only one, bearing a trace of his and remembering him constantly.

Picturing the human beings, all people seem to be there just in order to please themselves – even the members of the non-governmental search group are portrayed as some uncompassionate robots automatically performing their humanistic job. So in this level, LOVELESS rings an alarm to the world hasting towards some big wars. But whenever falling into the abyss of raw symbols (for instance, outlining the word, “Russia”, on the mom’s shirt) and verbal descriptions (for instance, when the mom retelling the frustrating story of her marriage in the car), the film could be simply reduced to a propagandistic piece or a repetitive melodrama. So if approached in another way and read as a melodramatic work, LOVELESS will be most possibly fallen into the abyss of oblivion as well. But as an allegorical tale, it proves to be an outstanding achievement in the world cinema today.