Official Oscar® Submission for Best Foreign Language Film from Austria: ‘Happy Ending’ by Michael Haneke
“All around us, the world, and we, in its midst, blind.”
A snapshot from the life of a bourgeois European family.
What is Michael Haneke’s vision in this film? We have seen his take on the young Adonises in Funny Games, the most devastating picture of modern sociopathology I have ever seen. And his view of the pathological origin of fascism in The White Ribbon, of the political scandal of the police mass murder and civilians turning a blind eye to the plight of Algerians in France in Cache, on sexual pathology run amock in The Piano Teacher.
Happy Ending features the best actors of a generation and of Haneke’s films, Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher), Jean-Louis Trintignant who played the same character in Amour, is now shown from another angle, the aging patriarch of the wealthy Callais clan, more interested in exiting this world than enjoying it.and Matthieu Kassovitz who has become a man since his youthful role in La Haine and here is having a graphic online affair.
As the self-centered, totally efficient businesswoman Anne (Isabelle Huppert) announces that her brother’s ex-wife’s daughter will be staying with the family while her mother is in the hospital where she is in intensive care for poisoning, we see a smug and self-centered, bickering bourgeouis family as the petri dish of psychopathology.
The flame beneath this specimen of dysfunction is adolescent Eve, who moves in after her mother’s “apparent” suicide attempt, and in true Michael Haneke fashion, she is one unsettling teen.
Now playing the AFI Fest, the Austrian auteur brings together his career-long fascinations with bourgeois guilt, surveillance, sins of the past and death of the most chilling degree, all into a cocktail of dread that is best served cold and clinical.
A coproduction of France, Austria, Germany, 107 min., 2017, French/English with English subtitles.
Writer-Director: Michael Haneke, Producers: Margaret Menegoz, Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka, Michael Katz, Director of Photography: Christian Berger, Editor: Monika Willi, Production Designer: Olivier Radot
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz, Fantine Harduin, Franz Rogowski, Laura Verlinden, Aurelia Petit, Toby Jones.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Michael Haneke was born in Munich and grew up in Austria. The Seventh Continent, his first theatrical feature, premiered in 1989 at the Munich Film Festival. His other features include Benny’s Video which premiered in Rotterdam in 1992, Funny Games which premiered at the London Film Festival in 1997 months before its second festival screening at Sundance in 1998 and Caché which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005. The White Ribbon (2009) and Best Foreign Language Film Oscar® winner Amour (2012) both played AFI FEST.
