Happy End (2009) User Reviews

Conceived with a broken story generator

[PogoNeo · 3/10 · 18 September 2016]

This movie presents to its viewers a series of odd, unlikely and improbable events, glued together with apocalyptic love story. Or to be more precise: epic love stories revolving around the main male character; that interact and overlap with each other, thus creating a kind of chaos. And the splitting of the told story into two timelines, was officially intended as a way of making this picture more interesting and / or artistic. But in reality, this is just an artsy gimmick that serves as a blunt cover up for a poor script

That pretty bad script delivers a slow action, witch is not suppose to be a minus in a movie like that. But it also jumps from place to place for doubtful reasons. They probably just kept pushing buttons in a malfunctioning story generator, which gave the movie results like switching from an affair in Spain to a snowy Canada with bandits on snowmobiles (which are still connected to each other of course). And was that generator used originally for the book or only later on for the transformation of the book material into a movie script, it does not really matter. Because the story is quite bad and sometimes even laughable

If you expect to experience apocalyptic or dystopic themes, there are some but serving only as background for a quite sexed up drama, that turns into a road movie. Although there is this one scene definitely worth watching, because of both the high quality cinematography and mood: when a lone character roams a deserted city in a pitch black, making a way through it with a big flashlight. But this scene is simply out of place, because it belongs to a more thriller / horror driven movie pictures. And what is more, the scene that tells us more about what kind of movie this really is, is the one where certain nude characters are running in a still functioning city. Or the scene when the viewers find out that a parent had sex with a descendant, because it is the end of the world and there are no moral or legal consequences any more

Well, if you use a broken story generator, there are consequences: waste of ideas and of good acting

End of the world road movie romance

[incitatus-org · 8/10 · 13 October 2009]

The world is coming to an end and does not do so quietly. Amid the chaos, we follow Robinson (Mathieu Amalric) who has just separated from his bourgeois wife Chloé (Karin Viard). While everyone is running, Robinson is searching, desperate to spend another night with the fantasy of his life, the extravagant Laetitia (played by the Dominican model Omahyra Mota). As world, morality and life crumble around him, he lungs himself forward in the unknown to be able to hold her once more.

This is a very curious film, mixing genres like they do not exist in a permanent flirt with the absurd. Even before entry. Consider the title -Last Days of the World- together with the slogan -Finally free!- and you know that you are in for a controversial ride. But where to? What are we to be freed of? The film definitely takes you places: from a chic Biarritz to a mythical Pamplona and from a refugee-filled Toulouse to the nightlife of Taipei. This is a road-movie in its true sense. You never know where they are taking you and what will happen next and with who.

In that moral emptiness provoked by the chaos of the end of the world, the characters discover an egoism they never before had the chance to reveal. This egoism leads them to be pulled along by desire rather than boxing it in for a conjugal peace. The pain and disappointment of separation are softened by the sentiment that nothing matters anymore, as suicides and deaths go by as the first passengers to board a flight. But none the less, rating sexual experience or desire as higher than self-preservation or a developed love is strange. Perhaps the idea originally sounded credible that, if the world ends you would pursue your unfulfilled desires. But would you, honestly, not rather be with the people you love? In real life, the answer would be related to how honest your life and love is. But in the film, most of the characters around Robinson seem to have chosen death or are fleeing in a desperate rush of self-preservation, but we are not encouraged to care about them.

It is Robinson who is our subject of interest. Swimming against the current, near oblivious to the crumbling world around him, he feels free from the conventions which bound him. And then we come to a sublime moment. He is walking with Laetitia, in a deserted post- apocalyptic Paris, when she takes off her clothes. Because she can. He does the same thing and they run through the empty streets happy in their back-to-nature state. And then, for just a few seconds, we see them crossing a busy boulevard with people and cars, as if nothing had changed, as if we are still in the here and now. Was that their imagination of convention shining back at them, or is the whole world-ending actually in his mind?

The film is filled with symbolic imagery to discover, dreamy eroticism and original locations. It is a mysterious road movie through the absurd which is really best watched late at night, when reasoning powers are looser and the adventure of an unpredictable world can welcome you in. A daring piece of cinema. (incitatus.org)

Ending the world with a bang !

[Sellers5 · 10/10 · 17 August 2009]

The latest in the never ending series of apocalyptic films, "Les derniers jours du monde", follows Robinson (Mathieu Amalric) through his journey from the french resort of Biarritz to Spain, when the world as we know it is coming to an end. The year before the apocalypse, he meets a beautiful woman (Omahyra Mota) and a passion starts. When she suddenly disappears, he tries to find her. But if people die, and bombs explode, the urge to live is stronger than ever. How would we react if our world crumbled and our social conventions with it ? This film answers in a quite unusual way. Rarely do we see in French cinema a plot involving end of the world action sequences. Here, they are coupled with character study, a realistic love story, great performances from Mathieu Amalric, but also Catherine Frot, and Sergi Lopez. No over the top CGI here, just overwhelming sequences and a very involving experience. Adapted from the eponymous novel by Dominique Noguez, this is by far the strongest film by the Larrieu brothers. Don't miss it !

2009 - watch it in 2021... eye opening piece of art!

[pskynk · 10/10 · 25 August 2021]

Don't expect logic or a simple plot. Live this movie, enjoy the emotions and feel the despair (although it's well hidden behind a romance)... for American viewers: enjoy the French openness and naked truth.

This movie is very underrated, maybe because it is not a blockbuster movie but a piece of art.

Maybe watch the 2021 news first then move on to this... well?

Apocalypse will come on the 14th of July

[dromasca · 9/10 · 8 December 2022]

'Les derniers jour du monde' (the title of the English version is 'Happy End'), the film by brothers Jean-Marie and Arnaud Larrieu, was made in 2009, at a time when films with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic themes - anyway among the most popular subjects in the history of cinema - were at a kind of peak of interest. So this film is about the end of the world as we know it, but the film is nothing like its American, British or other competitors from other parts of the world. Instead, very French themes related to the crises of mature ages, marital and extra-marital relationships, and the need for love appear in the film. As in Lars van Trier's 'Melancholia' which would be made two years later, the end of the planet is inexorably approaching. The counting of days has an end, on a day of Saturday - the seventh day of Creation - and July 14 - the holiday of France that ceases to exist. The characters of the film are not superheroes trying to save the planet, but ordinary people, for whom the last days of their lives and of humanity are a kind of liberation, an opportunity to try a late and full realization of dreams and vices.

It can be said that there are two parallel planes in 'Les derniers jours du monde'. On the one hand, the world is obviously and inevitably coming to an end. The causes of this Apocalypse are never fully explained, but it appears to be a devastating pandemic combined with an atomic war. Sirens sound, it rains ashes, soldiers or paramedics in protective suits fight an invisible disease. Any resemblance to news from the past 2-3 years is obviously coincidental, as the film was made in 2009. But that's just the background. In the foreground, the main hero with a symbolic name - Robinson - recalls the last year of his life, a year full of emotional events. He had met a fascinating and mysterious woman, much younger than himself, and had fallen in love with her. His 20 years long marriage had fallen apart, but his new love suddenly disappears, not once but twice or thrice. The story in the film is that of the search for the ideal woman (real? Imaginary?) in the apocalyptic present and in the recent past that would be destroyed by the unexpected events.

The combination of the two narrative planes works very well. Robinson finds in the catastrophe around him the opportunity to get rid of all complexes and conventions, to sleep with all the women he meets and to follow the phantasm of ideal love on all continents. The Larrieu brothers create an atmosphere of the Apocalypse without resorting to special effects, but also without saving cinematic means. The mass scenes, with thousands of extras, combine the images we know from history, filmed in the world wars, with those that have been seen in recent years on television screens only by those who had the chance not to experience them in reality. Did the Larrieu brothers have a premonition of what would happen a decade or so later? In any case, this is how this film looks, viewed at the end of 2022. Their vision has resonances with some of the films of Bunuel, Antonioni or Kubrick, describing a world that tries to live out its disintegration by continuing luxury and excesses. The acting performances are formidable from Mathieu Amalric's Robinson who lives his 40+ crisis and fanatical love against the backdrop of the end of the world, to Karin Viard and Catherine Frot who mirror him with voluptuousness and desperation and to the tenor Sergi López in a cameo role of a shocking sincerity. I can only wonder that this film was bypassed in its day by the Cesar awards or at major festivals. Maybe it was too early. This 2009 film brings to the screen the angst of 2022. It's worth watching or rewatching now. Before it's too late!