Some responses (by Tweet) to Happy End (2017), as seen on opening night
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 December
On opening night at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, some responses (by Tweet) to Happy End (2017), as seen on Friday 1 December 2017 at 8.50 p.m.
'Elle parle que d'elle' is a comment on the screen of a phone, as it appears that a domestic moment is filmed live in @HappyEndFilm (2017) :— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 3, 2017
Straightaway evoking Benny's Video (1992) (amongst others), Haneke is by no means just updating it, but revolving notions of our humanity. pic.twitter.com/xKRAOsX5rp
What connects screenings of these new films : Sally Potter's The Party (2017) and Michael Haneke's Happy End (2017) ?
Maybe some watching had expected broad comedy (and were intend on laughing aloud) or they 'don't get out much' (is one a sub-set of the other ?). Well, their responses were at least as disquieting as what provoked them, plus someone asked afterwards why 'it's called Happy End'... https://t.co/IIBCGLnNbP— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 2, 2017
With Happy End (2017), which was on general release from Friday 1 December 2017, perhaps (as alluded to in the Tweet above), it is not just the title, but also the folded A4 lobby-material [i.e. a card that is A5 and presents in landscape format], which has the (edited) image that appears above, occupying the front - under the caption A handy guide to Calais' favourite dysfunctional family². [Can we honestly conceive of this as Haneke's caption³... ?]
The shot has been edited in that, by removing the intervening window, it relocates an indoor scene (as shown, in context, in the Tweet below) to a balcony, which then, perspectivally, appears not just to overlook the sea, but also to give directly onto it.
Sally Potter's The Party (2017) and Haneke's @HappyEndFilm (2017) are arguably both ensemble films, but there the similarity stops : #HappyEnd's Anne (Isabelle Huppert), for example, has the space of not being in every scene, unlike Tom (Cillian Murphy), in the loo, or at the bin pic.twitter.com/Btxu7UoFu4— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 2, 2017
Without very many of the uncertainties that we know from Haneke in Caché (Hidden) (2005), or Code Unknown (Code inconnu [Récit incomplet de divers voyages]) (2000) before it, we already know *why* Murphy locked himself in the toilet - but yet Potter still shows him, snorting... ? pic.twitter.com/dWTDdONqGr— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 2, 2017
Yet (and both in the person of Jean-Louis Trintignant (Georges Laurent), and what Georges tells his granddaughter Eve (Fantine Harduin) befell his wife), he deliberately evokes the earlier Georges of Amour (2012), his wife Anne, and daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert), now an Anne.— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 2, 2017
But this has ever been his way, going back to The Seventh Continent (Der siebente Kontinent) (1989), and the family of Georg, Anna and Evi Schober...— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 2, 2017
Whatever Haneke's view of human experience, he then based it in fact (as another Hardy ?) - both are bleak, but brilliant films !
End-notes :
¹ Abbreviated for texting-type communication, the words translate as She only thinks about herself. [Starting with several annotated video-sequences, at the top of the film, there are more examples, but this phrase is taken from the first, and turns out, read alongside the others, to be the most significant.]
² Judging by this lobby-card³, could one not be forgiven for thinking that there is going to be a comical take on a family and its oddities - in the style, perhaps, even of The Addams Family... ? (As, also, with The Party : is the clue, surely, to expect a party in respect of which it is readily apt to invoke, ironically (the film's plot and script are so weakly conceived), Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party ?)
³ As with trailers, they are almost never the work of the people who made the film. (Even if, when trailers are made, they clearly use footage (including deleted scenes or other images that you will not see, if you watch the film), and re-order it to suggest a story - not unusually, quite misleadingly.) Trailers and other publicity are, rather, largely the handiwork of the film's distributors (with, obviously, some assistance from the film's producers) : a special knack for making good films look bad (and vice versa) is required ? !
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
