Hello
everyone,
For this Wednesday, we are showing a French movie
"Happy End" directed by Michael Haneke
(more details below).
Please feel free to pass the message around and
invite your friends. Hope you can join us.
Regards,
Tom Co
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Title: Happy End
Date and Time: September 11, Wednesday, 6:30-9
Place: 308 Cooper Ave, Hancock
Director: Michael Haneke
Partial List of Characters:
Isabelle Huppert
Jean-Louis Trintignant
Mathieu Kassovitz
Fantine Harduin
Franz Rogowski
Laura Verlinden
US Rating: R
Language: French (with English subtitles)
Length: 107 mins
Media: Bluray color
Summary: (by Nick Riganas via www.imdb.com)
"Gradually succumbing to dementia, George Laurent,
the octogenarian patriarch of the Laurents, an affluent
upper-bourgeois family, is uncomfortably sharing his
palatial manor in Calais, the heart of the infamous
migrant jungle, with his twice-married son, Thomas,
and Anne, his workaholic daughter who has taken over
the family construction business. ...Undoubtedly,
in this family, everyone has a skeleton in the closet,
and as the fates of the Laurents enmesh with insistent
and ignoble desires, a peculiar and disturbing alliance
will form. But in the end, some secrets are bigger than others."
My Comments:
First off, it does not have a "happy ending". If anything,
it is a skewering view of the upper class who has all the
priveleges and resource that should have allowed them to
be content but instead they simply get stuck in their
self-inflicted
sorrows. Some reviewers see the movie as a criticism of
modern
Europe in presence of a migration problem.
Beyond the inability of the upper class to make themselves
be happy, I found the character of the thirteen year old Eve to
be the most interesting, haunting and scary presence -- including
her use of social media, her voyeurism and her montrosity but
hidden
behind the innocence of a child...a reminder that the bad
behavior of
adults have a way more devasting effect than just on themselves.
The acting and direction is pretty good. However, it is
often
very slow and it contains several extended quiet scenes to allow
the audience to guess what is on the characters' minds.
Also,
it is not a plot-driven movie. In short, this may not be to
everyone's taste.
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