film synopsis
Michael Haneke, the master who brought us Cache, The White Ribbon and Amour, wields his camera like a surgeon with a scalpel. In his latest autopsy of the modern European soul, he focuses on a wealthy, wildly dysfunctional family in Calais. The dementia-afflicted patriarch (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is on a mission to kill himself, and having a hard time finding the right accomplice. His steely daughter Anne (Isabelle Huppert) now runs the family’s construction business, which is facing lawsuits for a lethal onsite accident, a crisis her hapless, self-loathing grown son Pierre is incapable of handling. Complicating matters is the arrival of 13-year-old Eve, the daughter of Anne’s philandering son from his first marriage, who has come to live with the family because her mother is in a coma from a drug overdose.
Haneke’s mordant satire of this spectacularly joyless French family is served up with a diamond-cutter’s precision and a wicked jolt of black humor.
In competition for the FIPRESCI Prize.