Film
Happy End
- Director
- Michael Haneke
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 108 mins
Cheery old Michael Haneke‘s belated follow-up to 2012’s Amour pokes a pointy satirical stick at the soft target of the Euro-bourgeoisie. The great Isabelle Huppert gets a peach of a role as the steely matriarch of a wealthy Calais clan, who has taken charge of the family construction business because of her father’s (Jean-Louis Trintignant) dementia. She’s engaged to Brit banker Toby Jones and struggling with her useless site supervisor son Franz Rogowski, who’s responsible for an industrial accident that could cost the family a fortune.
Meanwhile, her feckless brother Mathieu Kassovitz is conducting a clandestine affair and finds himself obliged to look after his 12-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. Monstrous behaviour, middle class hypocrisy, family dysfunction . . . it’s all pretty familiar stuff, but served up with considerable relish in what The Guardian‘s reviewer described as a “satanic soap opera of pure sociopathy”. Go here for our full review.
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