In the Anglophone world, the past few years have been rich for Scandinavian film artists. Consider, for example, the enormous international success of the Stieg Larsson series franchise, the dazzling critical reception to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Antichrist, and the awarding of last year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film to Susanne Brier’s In a Better World. For English language moviegoers, somber Nordic bittersweet is back.
But Norwegian filmmaker Anne Sewitsky struggles to adapt this aesthetic to the romcom genre in her (ironically titled) debut feature, Happy, Happy. Impressively for her first film, the movie earned Norway’s official submission to the Oscars, and it won last year’s Sundance World Dramatic Jury. Without question, Sewitsky is a precociously talented director, spilling over with tenderfoot audacity. But the movie she’s made is as flawed as it is boldly made. If you can stomach the movie’s thoughtless approach to racism, Happy, Happy has parts that are well worth watching, but not because you’re bound to fall merrily, merrily in love with it.
It’s weeks before Christmas, and the rolling hills of the Norwegian countryside are shrouded in snow. Up from the city with their adopted Ethiopian-born son Noa, sophisticated city couple Sigve (Henrik Rafaelson) and Elisabeth (Maibritt Saerens) are coming to rent a house on land owned by country couple Kaja (Agnes Kittelsen) and Eirik (Joachim Rafaelsen). The exposition unfolds over a bevy of polite dinners, party games, and emptied wine bottles: relative to the country mice, Sigve and Elisabeth suffer from a comparatively embarrassing wealth of savoir faire; Elisabeth just cheated on Sigve back in the city; Kaja and Eirik haven’t had sex in a year, and Eirik’s frequent hunting outings with the guys bear an uncanny resemblance to Ennis’s “fishing trips” to Brokeback Mountain.
No—fortunately—Happy, Happy doesn’t end in life-rending calamity. But between Kaja and Sigve’s brief encounter that initiates their affair and Elisabeth’s remonstrations of “I can’t live like this anymore” that finish it, things get complicated between Eirik and Sigve, icy-sexy Elisabeth feels increasingly isolated, and Noa and Theodor (Kaja and Eirik’s son)—virtually oblivious to what’s going on with their parents—engage in the most shocking aspect of the movie of all. I’ll come back to that later.
The screenplay feels like a petulant collaboration between Edward Albee and the writer of a Hallmark Channel holiday special. Tensions and animosities run high, but they quickly dissolve into a sob, some dry heaving over the toilet, or a sweetly-sung rendition of “Amazing Grace”. Because the characters lack depth, the revelations come easily and without surprise and with little movement. These four are too nice and fresh and unjaded: it’s implausible to think that they harbor the festering ancient grudges that could burst out into deliciously cruel dialogue and make this movie sizzle.
On the flip side, it’s hard to believe that these people really feel intensely about one another—much less about their children—enough to be cruel. You can’t make a good movie about an absence of love. Great movies like this are about people who love each other so much who cheat on one another. In Happy, Happy, no one really feels more than lukewarm about anyone else, so there’s virtually no emotional charge or satisfaction. There’s little that seems forbidden about the sex between Kaja and Sigve, and so, unlike the best infidelity stories, all that we’re left to savor in those scenes is an amicable appreciation for their happy sexual liberation.
In other words, there’s little build or suspense, hardly anything serious at stake in the main romantic storyline. Instead, the actors sustain our interest by looking pretty, smiling a lot, and behaving seeming like generally pleasant people. If you watch ’til the end, it’s probably because the two couples seem like the kind of people you’d enjoy living next to, and every now and then, share a pleasant dinner and a glass of wine.
They might make fine neighbors, but when it comes to this sort of movie I think most of us would prefer Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. Much to the chagrin of everyone, in Happy, Happy, that Hallmark Channel writer bests Edward Albee.
Tapping into the voguishness of indie folk chic, Sewitsky scrambles to add depth to the relationships by narrating them through a series of musical interludes sung by a bluegrass and spirituals quartet. But while laying an O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack over a Fargo landscape looks awfully neat in the movie’s trailer, many indie movie watchers will find Happy, Happy one wistful ukulele “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” too many. It’s worth noting that Sewitsky follows a now long line of filmmakers who’ve decided to score Millennial and Gen X romantic desire with acoustic Americana. By tuning this fairly conservative love story with folk, Sewitsky demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of the blues tradition she appropriates, and reveals a soupcon of conservatism lying hidden in similar appropriations.
For Sewitsky, bluegrass and spirituals become comfort music. She uses them to suggest the travails, but ultimately the tenacity, of a Norman Rockwell domesticity. The resolution of Happy, Happy implies that it’s only in specific (and “normal”) forms of stable family that we can shield ourselves from what’s represented as the harsh winter storm of modern life (cough, Hallmark Channel). But spirituals and the blues are about moving, straying far afield; there’s a longing for home but it’s intoned from a position of grasping distance rather than clinging proximity. The conceit might’ve worked had Sewitsky used the chorus quartet to counterpose and critique the film’s events, but instead the quartet becomes little more than a bit of clever stylistic window dressing, some mood music.
It wouldn’t be a bad movie, but it ultimately founders on the disgusting subplot involving the white child, Theodor’s, virtually unchallenged abuse of Noa, the black child. As Theodor threatens, harasses, hits, and even ties up and whips Noa in an inexplicable mock-reenactment of slavery, you wait for the moment in which Noa—or at the very least, one of the adults—does something to stop Theodor. This moment never comes. For sure, in his rejection of the adults’ sycophantic neediness he becomes, strangely, almost the hero of the movie.
But in the movie the character of Noa remains silent, unquestioning, constantly allowing himself to be manipulated. The racism goes uncommented on until the last few minutes, when inexplicably we see Noa watching President Obama giving a speech, which seems like it’s supposed to be a redemptive moment. And what happens to Theodor? Nothing. The movie ends with the racist child smiling glibly, not only unpunished but also undiscovered. Are we actually supposed to sympathize with him? Are we actually supposed to sympathize with the parents whose silly, self-obsessed little flirtations underwrote this boy’s violence?