From the prodigious Austrian auteur Michael Haneke, prima facie HAPPY END can be construed as a sequel to AMOUR (2012), with both Jean-Louis Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert returning as another father-daughter pair, but scale-wise, it is an upgrade, with Haneke's rapier-like scalpel mirthlessly levering at and dissecting a dysfunctional bourgeois household in Calais under a large milieu.
First thing first, extending his attentive exploration related to what constitutes today's cinematic gaze, Haneke situates his camera on our workaday digital devises, opening with several video clips from a live-recording smartphone (with morbid contents notwithstanding), to the (replay-prompting) footage of a security camera coldly witnessing an abrupt collapse on a construction site, then eyeing erotic exchanges from the screens of a personal email account and a facebook page between two secretive lovers, even to a swaggering Youtube video watched by the 13-year-old Eve Laurent (Harduin, an alumna from Belgium's Got Talent whose speciality is mentalism)....
reading my full review on my blog: cinema omnivore, thanks
First thing first, extending his attentive exploration related to what constitutes today's cinematic gaze, Haneke situates his camera on our workaday digital devises, opening with several video clips from a live-recording smartphone (with morbid contents notwithstanding), to the (replay-prompting) footage of a security camera coldly witnessing an abrupt collapse on a construction site, then eyeing erotic exchanges from the screens of a personal email account and a facebook page between two secretive lovers, even to a swaggering Youtube video watched by the 13-year-old Eve Laurent (Harduin, an alumna from Belgium's Got Talent whose speciality is mentalism)....
reading my full review on my blog: cinema omnivore, thanks