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.

K.