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https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/jerusalem-is-the-capital-of-palestine/
Am 06.12.2017 um 18:44 schrieb Louis Proyect via Marxism:
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Peter Byrne is an old friend who wrote for Swans as the same time as
me. This is his astute comment on Michael Haneke's "Happy End":
An Italian critic wondered why Michael Haneke was still hitting at the
upper-middle-class. Luis Bunuel, he said, had done the job a half
century ago. The critic missed the point of the disparate videos shown
at the start of ‘Happy End’. They demonstrate that our world has made
great strides in triviality, numbed values and inhumanity. In the same
way the ultra-smooth damage control of the industrialist Madame
Laurent (Isabelle Huppert) is much more efficient than that of
Bunuel’s time.
When he (or Pasolini or Visconti) threw a grenade into a bourgeois
salon, it caused a stir. There was a reaction. Money power and control
are now more confident. When the rebel son of the Laurent family
brings a bevy of black refugees into the clan’s formal dinner at a
luxury restaurant, the seated guests don’t miss a bite. The young man
is led away defeated and his mother calls for a table for the
intruders. In a Bunuel story they would have got thrown out or have
taken over the place.
Not that Madame Laurent will invite them back. She runs the firm and
is busy with lawyers evading responsibility over the death of an
employee in an worksite accident. Her response is just as smooth when
her Moroccan servant’s daughter is bitten by a household dog. A box of
chocolates, the bite declared a scratch, and business as usual.
Grandfather Laurent (Jean-Louis Trintignant) injects some humanity
into the family circle. However, it could be mere senile aberration.
After all isn’t he the source of the Laurent fortune? His disgust with
his family may be just an old man’s bile. In any case his overriding
wish is simply to die. Here he rejoins the character Trintignant
played in Haneke’s masterpiece of 2012, ‘Amour’. There the
middle-class was not under fire but merely furnished the film with a
social setting. (For all his social criticism Haneke is an aesthete
and delights in filming elite interiors.)
‘Amour’ is the story of a very old couple who live in an atmosphere of
sober affection. The woman (the magnificent Emmanuelle Riva from the
1959 ‘Hiroshima mon amour’) has a debilitating stroke. Her husband
(Trintignant) gives her very personal care, but she’s reduced to being
a conscious vegetable. She wants to die, her husband wants her to
live, but after soul-searching he smothers her with a pillow, as it
were, with love. The film throws a sharp light on the controversy much
discussed in Europe just now of assisted suicide.
Grandfather Laurent in Haneke’s ‘Happy End’ has some fleeting moments
of confidence with his thirteen-year-old granddaughter. The girl has
been deeply upset by her father’s two marriages and by his latest
affair whose physical side she found documented in detail on his
computer. This drives her to attempt suicide. Haneke’s astuteness here
is remarkable. The thirteen-year-old isn’t a neglected child. She
wants nothing materially and her father is in fact concerned for her
feelings. But he expresses his concern in the same way that Madame
Laurent exercises damage control for the firm. Her Grandfather asks
her in a casual tone about her attempt at suicide and tells her he’s
planning to make his own a success. He also tells her that he
smothered his stricken and suffering wife. (But he’s an old man other
than the old man in ‘Amour’.)
In a moment of domestic confusion, Granddad, confined to a wheelchair,
asked his granddaughter to push him to the top of a slope by the sea.
She steps back and he propels himself into the water. As he goes under
the girl takes a photograph with her cellphone. She belongs to her
times just like the videos at the film’s start.
This isn’t a movie for the Christmas season. It’s too true for that.
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