The Oxford English Dictionary describes HAPPY as an
adjective denoting a feeling of pleasure or contentment.
Jacques Attali in We, Europeans, Are Alone, said, since the twenties, Europeans gradually became
accustomed to the idea that, even if they made a thousand mistakes, there would
always be someone to save them from their own turpitude. And the United States
also gradually settled into the role of Deus ex Machina. And indeed, they saved
us (with Stalin) from Nazi monsters with their army; they saved us from our
economic sclerosis with the Marshall Plan; and they saved us from the Soviet
threat with their nuclear missiles. He further elaborated, this support has always been carefully
managed and limited: the Americans had done everything so that their Allies
could continue needing them. It was out of the question for the Europeans to be
independent militarily, financially, culturally, industrially or
technologically. There was not a single strategic industry in which the United
States did not seek to either maintain control, or deprive the Europeans from
doing so. Similarly, there was not an area of law where the Americans did not
try to set the rules. And there was not an area in innovation where the
Americans were not pulling the strings. Today,
everything has changed. Europeans can no longer afford to not see that they are
alone; that the Americans are no longer there to defend them; that the American
President makes his decisions without taking into account either the point of
view or the interests of their allies.
You might as well wonder what I am trying to arrive
at by drawing a corollary to something as commonplace as politics when the
composition of this piece was meant to be on film. What people hardly ever
understand is that a great deal of film has to do with what is around us – it
is a medium that rather mirrors existence. While America did manage to militarily,
financially, culturally, industrially or technologically control the Europeans,
one thing it failed to control was their art and cinema, more so due to the tenacious
temperament of the creative people not succumbing to any sort of external coercion,
and this is what HAPPY, written, produced, and
directed by Jordan Goldnadel is fundamentally about.
Jordan plays the protagonist
Florent, 23, an upper class Parisian. He is intelligent, kind, and dressed with a
philosophical smile. He meets Alessia (Isabelle
Ryan), 23, a continually fuming, strangely sophisticated and nonsensically
naïve lost American photographer in Paris. Bored in a
society that praises the failures of men and women who give each other what
they ‘need’ and not what they ‘want’ with the result that love becomes
infected, Florent feels fossilised in Paris, and dreams of America. Alessia, on
the other hand is trying to separate herself from her typical origins, far from
the artistic and adventurous life she intends to lead, and dreams of achieving
it in France. As luck would have it, Florent and Alessia meet at a park, where
Alessia begins to take photographs of Florent without his consent. Amused at
her brazenness, he asks her if she isn’t aware of image rights, and instead of
finding herself engulfed in a pail of shame, she grins and asks him by virtue
of gestures to move his face a little to a side in order for her to take more
pictures of him.
Life is small, I had read somewhere, and our routines are rote and nearly
imperceptible. Often, in writing classrooms, we’re told that it’s this
smallness that makes a piece of literature. It said that most of our lives are basically mundane
and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting (that’s Updike). Or, Life is not plot;
it’s in the details (that’s
Jodi Picoult). Usually, though, this sentiment ends up seeming as hollow and
insincere as: write what you know because we do cherish plot, we do fetishize the arc, the action, and the
twist, in nonfiction, we also fetishize the about-ness. We openly question if the reality of a
writer’s subject is worth discussing. We prioritize a weighty topic over the
force of an author’s gaze, the clarity of prose, the sincerity of emotion.
Underneath it all runs that same droning question: Who cares? Who cares? Who
cares? Virginia
Woolf really cared about that poor moth, and Didion really cared about her
notebook, and Montaigne really cared about, well, everything. That
is Jordan as a writer to me – inventive, and not some celebrity who lands up on
a talk show and narrates a story about their kids as though no other child has
ever existed. Admire how he cares about the close
ups of objects – of the food, of expressions, of the waiter cleaning the table
at the café, the book lying on the table. Every little element has something
that is stunning in Happy because movies merely like to concentrate on the
extravagant. They like to light up every frame like people are dressed up to go
to a party. And anyone who has lived well enough to understand life understands
that we are not always our best all the time, and life is certainly not a
party, (despite us wanting to present to the world that we each live in this
gorgeous, near perfect life in a predominantly ‘social media’ driven world). On
a larger stance the attentiveness to such detail was a befitting symbol of
stopping awhile and taking note of things that we generally tend to overlook
whilst going about the drudgery of day-to-day survival. The further
attention to art and artefacts, the artistry of the etching on the whiskey
glasses, the scarlet Cartier lighter, each of them that are brought into
cinematic focus are there to tell us a story within a story. Florent disrobing
the shrimp at the restaurant as Alessia begins to speak is a strapping allegory
that leads to the robust manner in which her feelings are denoted in the setting.
The fascinating part: where she utters ‘and’, pauses, and then utters another
‘and’, and concludes it with, “Oh, my mother just died.” reminded me of The
Outsider by Albert Camus. Although the scene sports an easy demeanour, it is not
easy in the least. I urge you to read Camus in order to appreciate why I say
this about the writing of Jordan.
The creative canvas
that Jordan Goldnadel draws up for Florent and Alessia who are shown at a crucial crossroad of their lives, very anchored in their
generation, and are yet torn is an thought-provoking curve of human psychology.
They ask – Who am I? What will I do with my life? Where will I live? Does the
right person exist? Do I want what’s expected of me? Such questions do tend to
assault us at various stages of our life. “What’s the use of falling in love
if
you both remain inertly as-you-
were?” Mary McCarthy asked her
friend
Hannah Arendt
in their correspondence about love. A derivative of the same
question is what Jordan undertakes to answer in Happy. These queries resonate
the current state of the mind, because love, as someone once said,
speaks to a
central necessity of
our life — at its truest and most
potent, love invariably
does
change us by de-conditioning our
painful pathologies and elevating
us toward
our highest human
potential. Love tells us that in the
romantic ideal upon which our modern mythos of
love is built, the solidity of that togetherness is taken to such an extreme so
as to render love fragile, and when lovers are expected to fuse together so
closely and completely, mutuality mutates into a paralysing co-dependency — a
calcified and rigid firmness that becomes brittle to the possibility of growth.
In the most nourishing kind of love, the communion of togetherness coexists
with the integrity of individuality, the two aspects always in dynamic and
fluid dialogue. The philosopher Martin Heidegger captured this beautifully in
his love letters to Hannah Arendt: “Why is love rich beyond all other
possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp?
Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.”
The irony of modern life is that love stories have become horror
stories and horror stories, love stories. Like the ageing Hollywood crowd,
films are thin and flabby, in bad taste, ostentatious, vulgar. Either they are
inadequately overdressed or expensively undressed. There was once a time when
in Hollywood the houses began to become as plush as hotels, and yet the people
who lived in these houses began to make hotels their residences. That is quite
the difference between the American and European cinema, its experience. This
is the point where one can almost hear the words of Mary Oliver echo – “All of it, the differences and the maverick
uprisings, are part of the richness of life. If you are too much like myself,
what shall I learn of you, or you of me?”
In recent years, largely due to the uncertainty of the producers about
what will draw the audience based more so on the fickleness of the audience,
films at the very stage of scripting may shift several perspectives and may be
finally cut into a product that is not appealing to the people who come to
enjoy a film. This is where Happy was sombre and stylish. It was quite a
rhythmical vision. The characters were developed without any highbrow
pretentions. You got what you saw, and what you saw was quite the slice of an
impersonal and abstract atmosphere, mixed with frankness about a film that took
itself seriously.
Also, we live in times where the younger audience does not react to
love on the screen. They are eternally distracted and talking amidst
themselves, until of course ghastly images of blood and gore make them shut up
and take notice. Why don’t they react to love one may ask? They don’t perhaps
react to love because they are not used to the idea of love, they are married
to their gadgets, they find a dopamine high in bursts of likes and shares on
social media, and they are depressed when nobody reacts to their posts or their
shares, and as an extension of such vacuous lifestyle choices the very idea of
having to be in a real flesh and blood relationship makes them squirm with
fright. What about the older audience then one may ask? The older audience on
the other hand care less for the storyline. They go to the movies merely to
watch the sex. So what happens to the rest – the intellectuals? Unfortunately,
they are left with nothing, unless of course people like Jordan Goldnadel shape
scripts like Happy that are packed with a profound sense of contemplation.
Television, and the internet, with all its breaks and cuts, and the
inattention, except for action, and spinning the dial to find some conflict, is
partly responsible for the destruction of the narrative sense – that delight in
following a story through its complications to its conclusion, which is perhaps
a child’s first conscious artistic pleasure. The old staples of entertainment –
inoffensive genres like the adventure story, or the musical, or the ghost story,
or the detective story are no longer commercially safe for moviemakers, and it
may be that audiences don’t have much more than a TV span of attention left:
they want to be turned on and they spend most of their time turning off. Something
similar and related may be happening in reading tastes and habits too: teens
have often read Salinger and some Orwell, Joyce maybe, and sometimes even
Dostoyevsky, but they are not interested in the ‘classic’ English novels of
Scott or Dickens, and what is more to the point, they don’t read the Sherlock
Holmes stories or even the modern detective fiction that in the thirties and
forties was an accepted part of the shared experience of adolescents. Perhaps
they want much more from entertainment than the civilised, but limited rational
pleasures of the genre pieces. And more likely, the box-office returns support
this; they want something different. Audiences that enjoy shocks and
falsifications, the brutal series of titillations, they want one thrill after
another, don’t care any longer about the convections of the past, and are too
restless and apathetic to pay attention to motivations and complications, cause
and effect. They want less effort, more sensations, and more knobs to turn.
Sexuality is depicted in various films with an innate
rationale, or imposed upon by time-tested, accepted ideologies. Happy is the
only film where I found that the people who made love to each other did so without
attempting to intellectualise it. As adults what we do with each other,
regardless of the societal clichés or labels, is entirely up to us, and we are
not obliged to offer anybody an explanation for it. Culture has mortared
certain stubbornly trifling guidelines on us, and it judges us by those barren strictures,
and this is where we must break that die and be undaunted by the world’s assessment
of our actions. We must do exactly as our heart desires, because desires aren’t
lead by intellect but by instinct, and instinct isn’t erroneous.
Actor and director Vladimir Perrin as Thomas is strong and opinionated. He can take to different ideas but is intolerable to assumed stupidity that branches from half-baked wisdom rather than from learning or experiences in Happy. Léa Moszkowicz as Marion is impressive as a friend. A Marion is needed, most urgently, in people’s lives, a life that is seeing the line blur between what friendship is, and how friendship ought to be. The camerawork of Jean Sotelo is appropriate for the tone of the movie. The music by Izzy Gaon is effective. The soundtrack includes some great Amanda Palmer songs and the surprise of surprises is the lilting number Ek Ladki Ko Dekha To Aisa Laga by Rahul Dev Burman from our very own Indian film 1942: A Love Story.
When the final credits begin to roll, Happy leaves
you with a
feeling of pleasure and contentment, and one recollects Leo Tolstoy who said, if
you want to be happy, be.
