Reseñas de la crítica

Haneke presents [Eva's relationship with Georges] as ironically positive, showing how the two bond over their mutual contempt for the people around them. Yet this development doesn't register as truly provocative, since Haneke has already explored the longing for death more disturbingly (in Benny's Video) and more poignantly (in Amour). It's another moment in Happy End that registers like a track on a greatest hits album as opposed to a fresh discovery.

After the poignant tenderness of The White Ribbon (2009) and Amour (2012), Michael Haneke teams back up with the Devil in Happy End, his eagerly awaited but coldly received take on modern technology and the European migrant crisis. As topical as it is, Haneke's latest exercise in cynicism and violence unfolds in a string of clichés about bourgeois dysfunction and malaise, littered with contrived characters whose privileged status only partially explains their lack of dramatic depth.

Instead of conventional transitions, there are abrupt shifts that resembles clicking through channels on a television. A scene of domestic disorder will cut to a web video in which an adolescent boy giddily chronicles his hair and skateboarding styles from videos past, and the movie lets this clip roll on quite a while before showing us that it's something Eve is watching on her computer. This strategy has a distancing effect, but also forces the viewer to stay on his or her toes.

Haneke takes circuitous routes to arrive at rather simplistic observations—namely, that modern technology is a plague and that the rich are soul-sick and insulated from real-world troubles. He's concocted a plot just busy enough to distract from these worn cynicisms and a set of characters too enigmatic to dismiss as mere chess pieces off the bat, but by the end, Happy End reveals itself as something vacuous and cold, a bizarrely seductive pseudo-thriller lacking a thoroughly worked-out payoff.

The film proceeds like a melodrama, but you may leave the theater thinking you've just seen the blackest of comedies. . . . The conclusion of Happy End is too neat, too intricately determined by foregoing events, to qualify as realism, but it still induces the grim sort of laughter that comes with witnessing contradictions laid bare.

This return to form(alism) is self-conscious, and one way to read – and quickly dismiss – Happy End is to characterise it as a greatest hits album of sorts, with all the old Haneke classics, from sociopathic teens and monstrously self-involved bourgeois parents to class warfare, racism and assisted suicide in one handy tracklist. Such a characterisation, while not inaccurate, ignores the subtle but significant shift in the material towards a lighter, though hardly benign, seriocomic tone.

The language of romance here is, as I've been told by a native speaker, antiquated, overblown, and very French. The stilted tapping on the keyboard is a comical overture for the salacious correspondence, but perhaps it's nice to see that the neutered interface of social media network platforms don't seem to obstruct truly libidinal expressions.

The film unfolds in an episodic manner so that certain, discrete moments recall characters and incidents from Haneke's Benny's Video, Code Unknown,Caché, The White Ribbon, and Amour—yet here he replaces those films' shock tactics with mild, almost blasé frustration. The title indicates an ironic reckoning with the end, and one might expect a major comeuppance for this cast of jerks. Nothing doing. The ultimate shrug with which Happy End wraps up might be its greatest strength.

It should go without saying at this point that the title of Austrian miserablist Michael Haneke's new film is a cruel joke–, and an unsurprising one at that. What's more unfortunate than the forced irony, however, is that just as the title seems to have been spit out by an art-cinema name generator, so does the movie itself play as something of a parody of Haneke's past accomplishments.

By any other standards, Happy End would undoubtedly be a commanding film, but given how loftily Haneke had placed the bar for himself with his preceding body of work, it comes across merely as middling fare, and elicited barely a ripple of excitement on the Croisette (not to mention going empty-handed in the prize ceremony).

Though formally demanding—we are tasked with following various characters who come and go, without much context—Happy End feels thematically easy for those familiar with Haneke's work. The film unfolds like a curation of his favourite ideas from movies past, a self-referential object predictably filtered through the theme of bourgeois malaise.

Haneke, a two-time Palme d'Or winner who left Cannes empty-handed for the first time since 2003's Time of the Wolf, is working in a slightly more sardonic register here but Happy End is otherwise business as usual—in fact, it's a self-conscious reprise of Haneke's greatest hits, training its microscope on an extended bourgeois family in Calais, France, where a refugee crisis is unfolding under their oblivious noses.