Michael Haneke’s precise, layered Happy End takes on – what else? – the bourgeoisie, and sees Eavesdropping welcome 2018 and iTunes availability at last! Opening with praise for the extraordinary image quality provided by the mac’s 4K projector, we consider the film’s surprising comic sensibility, its observation of different social strata, how our expectations shaped our experiences of what we saw (or didn’t see), Haneke’s surprising and subtle subversions of cinematic conventions, and his continued exploration of violence as a central theme and colonialism and race as something that would be invisible but for it constantly being on the edges and structuring.
The humour is dark but there’s lots of it: We never before knew that Haneke wanted us to have a good time.
Recorded on 7th January 2018.
The podcast can be listened to in the player above or at this link
José Arroyo and Michael Glass of Writing About Film
