Review: Happy End

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Austria's Michael Haneke has been one of Europe's most reliably interesting filmmakers in recent years, so it's a disappointment that "Happy End" - a sequel, of sorts, to 2012's masterful "Amour" - doesn't quite work. Similar to some of his earlier works, Haneke's latest is another of the type of European art film that, popular in the 1960s and 1970s, attacked the values and lifestyles of the bourgeoisie. "Happy End" doesn't take a satirical approach to this type of material - as Luis Bunuel or Pier Paolo Pasolini might have done - but is more in line with Haneke's bleak films from the 1980s and 1990s.

The picture centers around the Laurent family, which is led by paterfamilias Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), whose character was one of the two leads in "Amour," and includes daughter Anne (Isabelle Huppert), who runs the family's construction business, as well as surgeon son Thomas (Matthieu Kassovitz), his second wife, Anais (Laura Verlinden), and Pierre (Franz Rogowski), Anne's seemingly troubled son. Eve (Fantine Harduin), Thomas' 13-year-old daughter from his first marriage, comes to live with the family after her mother has put herself into a coma via an overdose of sedatives.

Haneke frequently uses gadgets - such as cell phones and online chatting - to portray communication between the characters or present their worldview. For example, Eve records various depressing visual anecdotes, such as the time she fed her hamster sedatives or a final sequence - which happens to be one of the film's most memorable images - during which the possibly senile Georges makes his own attempt at suicide. And Thomas carries on an online love affair with a cellist that is mostly portrayed through their various kinky texts and emails.

And therein lies one of the film's problems. Using technology to move a story forward is a tricky thing. Take Olivier Assayas' marvelous "Personal Shopper" as an example of a picture that utilizes this to its full potential, during a scene in which two characters have a creepy conversation via texting. In "Happy End," the use of texts, emails, iPhone footage and other gadgetry is overdone and it takes some time to figure out who is contacting whom.

Also, the various storylines are not filled out enough to make much of an impact. The picture opens with an impressively shocking collapse of a work construction site. Much of Anne's problems in the film revolve around a potential lawsuit from that accident and whether her wayward son can get involved in the family business and remain reliable during the crisis. Trintignant is given the most to do and the film's most impactful sequence involves his talking to his granddaughter about her morbid habits.

Haneke is a great filmmaker. Three of his past five films - "Cache," "The White Ribbon" and "Amour" - have been remarkable and his filmography also includes the powerful "Time of the Wolf" and engrossing "Code Unknown." "Happy End" is not a bad film - it certainly didn't turn me off in the way that "Funny Games" and its remake did - but merely a misfire with a handful of interesting scenes and a solid late performance by Trintignant. Haneke has made better films and I expect he'll make others that are better than this one.