dir. todd solondz
st. jane adams, elizabeth ashley, dylan baker, lara flynn boyle, ben gazzara
released by dendy films

A better title would have been "Ugliness", but this is definitely a ray of hope for cinema at the end of the millenium - that there are still places we have not gone, people we have not seen, perversions yet to be shared and understood. Happiness is new territory in what filmmakers can do and get away with. It is a slow, long, messy film with several awkward contrivances, but it also has flashes of genius - the dog licking the cum, the final line of the movie "I came! I came."; the psychiatrist and the bravery to let him admit fucking young boys was great and he'd do it again; the self-obsessed writer who's conceit and disdain encourages the audience to identify with her detestable neighbour, to actually want him to fuck her - which really is a major achievement of charaterisation and positioning - to get an audience to identify with a murderer, a rapist, a pedophile, and a whole host of other hapless hopers. This film strikes a chord because it outs the world of the white lie, the secret desire, the dark thought, the nightmare and the fantasy. Like Freudian psychoanalysis it seeks to make the latent and the repressed real and recognised. "It's okay to be fucked up" is the element of catharsis in this film. And because it is so unashamedly perverse and disturbing it is a quality experience - it either drives people out of the cinema or it makes them think and talk about issues we as a society need to talk about but rarely do, except in simplified and dismissive moral cliches that let us escape the ugliness of the reality facing some people. It is not condoning the subject so much as broaching it - a "please consider" moreso than a "oh what a feeling". It elicits a strong emotional response, but by putting a human face to failure, frustration, self-hatred, and sexual urges, blurs the morality of our "hang 'em all/lock 'em up and throw away the key" mentality. As such, Happiness is an amoral film that elicits a sophisticated self-questioning moral response. It is investigative not exploitative, a comedy not a tragedy, genius rather than gratuitous.

So go see it, but avoid Verona cinema 3 - that bloody EXIT sign is so distracting - bigger and brighter than the whitmans bloody lightship!

eugene chew
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