Happy End Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.5

Happy End Blu-ray Movie Review

La graine mauvaise?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 6, 2018

Though it’s not widely remembered today, 1969’s The Happy Ending garnered two Academy Award nominations that year, for its lead performance by Jean Simmons (then wife of writer-director Richard Brooks) and for what I personally consider to be one of the most ravishing songs to ever emerge from an otherwise kind of turgid melodrama, “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?”, with music by Michel Legrand and a beautiful lyric by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. The Happy Ending detailed the trials and tribulations of a marriage, and in a way that’s part of what informs this French film with a somewhat similar title, though Happy End could also reasonably be seen as a kind of dark French take on The Bad Seed, not to mention any number of other films which depict the roiling dysfunctions of a multigenerational family. This film also has a single writer-director guiding things, in this case Michael Haneke, and in yet another way Happy End might be seen as a kind of weird “almost” sequel to his Academy Award winning film of several years ago, Amour, since it once again offers Jean-Louis Trintignant as an elderly man named Georges Laurent, again with a daughter portrayed by Isabelle Huppert, though in this case she’s named Anne rather than Eva as in Amour. Adding to this confusing concatenation of references is the fact that Emmanuelle Riva’s character in Amour was named Anne, and the little girl at the center of an unsettling series of events in Happy Ending is named Eve (Fantine Harduin).

While there’s some “meta” consternation for those aware of Haneke’s filmography, Happy End itself presents its own inherent inscrutability as it opens, with a series of seemingly random vignettes that almost cry out for some kind of linking mechanism. The film opens with a kind of creepy “voyeur cam” taken from a cellphone, with a woman in the distance completing her nightly toilet routine while someone texts various comments about it. That then segues to an even creepier cell phone video of someone saying they’ve spiked their pet hamster’s food with antidepressants that belong to their mother. A disturbing scene which seems to document the hamster’s death follows (the film has the standard “no animals were harmed” verbiage in its closing credits, so one hopes this was an example of craft). Even weirder (if that’s possible) is the first “widescreen” moment in the film, a fisheyed view of a construction site that seems to be sourced off a security camera which documents a frightening (and very real looking) collapse of part of a foundation footings wall in a huge excavation that is obviously designed to ultimately house a skyscraper. What exactly is going on?

A number of seemingly unconnected “dots” follow until finally things kinda sorta fall into place with the revelation that Eve’s mother is comatose in a hospital after overdosing on her antidepressants, though there’s a clear implication that Eve may know more than she’s letting on. Eve is shipped off to her remarried father Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz), a guy she’s already disparaged (in that aforementioned hamster incident), and who is remarried to the quiet Anaïs (Laura Verlinden). The construction accident is finally woven into the proceedings when it’s revealed that Thomas’ sister is Anne (Isabelle Huppert), owner of the construction firm which was building the edifice that gave way, seriously injuring a worker in the process. Also in this already simmering family stew are Anne and Thomas’ father Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who seems to be suffering from dementia, and Anne’s son Pierre (Frank Rogowski), the construction supervisor at the fractured building site, and a young man who seems to have a serious drinking problem.

There’s a lot going on in Happy End, as may be gleaned from the foregoing summary, but as those legendary “as seen on tv” commercials often go, “but wait, you also get. . .”: in another somewhat obfuscatory element, sexually charged texts are seen being crafted without the crafter (initially) being identified, lending a whole subtext that eventually spills out in the open when it’s revealed that a major character has been engaged in a torrid affair. There is at least one suicide attempt, and an outright reference to the aforementioned Amour (at least for those who have seen it), all within an ongoing arc involving the construction mishap and potential liability on the part of the Laurents. There’s even a completely odd subplot linking Anne to an English man named Lawrence Bradshaw (Toby Jones). Is it too much? Some may feel so, but it’s remarkable how effortlessly Haneke weaves these disparate elements together into a rather compelling story of family dysfunction, even if the conclusion may offer more questions than answers.

Happy End is arguably a bit too stuffed full for its own good (I haven’t even gotten into the apparently Muslim caretakers the Laurents employ, or a vicious dog that figures into the proceedings), but it’s often viscerally involving, and it features a number of really outstanding performances. It’s of course gratifying to see a legend like Trintignant still working, and Huppert is always a treasure, but for me personally it was the young Harduin who walked away with this picture. She’s both incredibly vulnerable and just downright pathological in about equal measure, and she makes this film more than a bit unsettling at regular intervals.

Happy End Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Happy End is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. Kind of surprisingly for a "small scale" feature, the IMDb lists this as having had a 4K DI prepared from digital capture achieved by Arri Alexa cameras. The results here are solid if perhaps not quite as staggering as "4K DI" often tends to almost automatically suggest to some videophiles. The bright sunny climes of Calais provide a lot of beautiful scenery, and the outdoor material tends to pop with a lot of precision, along with generally excellent fine detail levels. Some of the interior material doesn't tend to fare quite as well, and some scenes (somewhat curiously, a lot of them featuring Pierre) are actually fairly murky looking, without any stupendously effective detail levels on display. The palette is somewhat blanched quite a bit of the time, with an emphasis on neutral tones that tends to make scenes like a beach sequence with Thomas and Eve pop all the more, if only by comparison. Some moments are deliberatey "lo-fi" as they are purportedly sourced from phonecams (see screenshot 6) or computer monitor chats (see screenshot 12). There are no compression issues of note.

Happy End Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Our specs above list a French track delivered via DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, but in actuality Happy End is a bilingual affair, with not just Toby Jones speaking his native tongue, but some of the other international actors also occasionally lapsing into English at times. Subtitles are forced for the spoken French moments, but there are also optional additional English subtitles for the English sequences as well. The sound design here isn't especially ambitious, and in fact a lot of the film is built out of rather intimate (in more ways than one) dialogue sequences. That said, there is good surround activity in scenes like Pierre's made club escapades or the aforementioned beach scene. All elements are delivered with fine fidelity and no problems of any kind.

Happy End Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Making of Happy End (1080p; 21:13) is standard EPK fare, but benefits from some good interviews.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1:50)

Happy End Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Happy End never quite attains the emotional catharsis that Amour did, an in fact it's often a kind of perplexing film from a "feeling" standpoint, with motives sometimes unclear and dysfunctions just kind of offered as a given without a ton of backstory. That said, performances are really acute here, especially young Fantine Harduin, who in my estimation walks away with the film despite the participation of heavyweights like Trintignant and Huppert. Technical merits are fine, and Happy End comes Recommended.