When a Michael Haneke film clicks (Hidden or Amour), it can be an incredible and exquisite thing but when it doesn’t (Funny Games), it can be irritating as hell. Unfortunately this family drama about the wealthy Laurents is more of the latter. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays the patriarch and Isabelle Huppert and Mathieu Kassovitz, his grown-up children. As Haneke’s stationary camera gazes dispassionately in his signature long shots, we observe individual, fragmented scenes that often time jumps with important events happening off-screen and we have to piece the stories together ourselves. Every family member has its own subplots but they don’t seem to converge into a coherent whole, except that of Trintignant’s character and his granddaughter Eve, played by an impressive Fantine Harduin. The various storylines merely meander and skirt around each other and the film feels distracting and unfocused. Toby Jones appears in this film, though god only knows why; while Huppert proves the adage that she is immensely watchable even if she is reading the telephone directory as her plot has as much impact as her doing just that. The best thing here is the ending (and I don’t mean it like that, or maybe I do) as the last scene befits the tone of the film perfectly – droll, bewildering and abrupt – but unless Haneke is doing observational comedy as indie drama, I left the cinema with no idea what this mess is about.
@SubtitledFriend 