Happy End (1967): the kind of film that could spark a lifelong obsession with Czech comedy (Review)

A quote from Søren Kierkegaard – don’t worry, this gets funny soon – kept coming to mind as I watched Oldřich Lipský’s Happy End, now released on Blu-Ray for the first time by Second Run. The Danish philosopher said “It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards.” In Lipský’s film, though, even living backwards can’t save its anti-hero Frydrych from massively misinterpreting the lessons of his sordid life.

In a bravura performance from the beloved Czech comedian Vladimír Menšík, we first see Frydrych’s severed head being taken out of the basket underneath a guillotine. This, Frydrych claims in posthumous voiceover, is the joyous occasion of his birth. From here on, Lipský’s film runs backwards, as each of the crimes that earned Frydrych the death penalty are redeemed by being reversed. Both Jonathan Owen in his booklet and Cerise Howard in her video essay compare Happy End to Christopher Nolan’s Memento, while also acknowledging that this does not do justice to Lipský’s achievement. Intricate as it is, Memento is still just a series of conventional movie scenes that happen to be arranged in reverse order. In Happy End, everything bar most of the dialogue runs backwards, and even then that’s “most of”, not “all of”. People dive out of lakes and magically dry off, diners reach into their mouths and pull food out, and meat cleavers reattach limbs to bodies.

Out of the extraordinary generation of Czech and Slovak film-makers who appeared during the 1950s and 1960s, there were many talented comedy directors. Vĕra Chytilová’s Daisies, Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball and Jindřich Polák’s Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea are all extremely funny and rightly acclaimed. Those directors, however, also made plenty of serious dramas. Lipský was the Czechoslovak New Wave’s comedy specialist, and as such he tends to be overlooked. Comedy has always struggled to receive the acclaim bestowed upon even the most mediocre drama. To prove this, check when your favourite comedy film was released, then look up what won Best Picture at the Oscars in the same year, or read Owen’s booklet, which records the New York Times‘s Vincent Canby sniffily dismissing Happy End as a “single cinematic trick” with “limited philosophical application”. Second Run’s gorgeous transfer, taken from a brand-new restoration from the Czech National Film Archive, becomes a tribute not just to Happy End but to a director who never got his critical dues.

Directly before Happy End, Lipský made Lemonade Joe, a riotous Western spoof that became one of Czechoslovakia’s most popular comedies. His other films include I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen, a time-travel farce almost as brilliant as Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up…, and Adele Hasn’t Had Her Dinner Yet, a near-indescribable mash-up of public-domain pulp characters and creature effects from a young Jan Švankmajer. Compared to these time-travel films and genre spoofs, Happy End wears its period setting lightly. Lipský set his film in the early twentieth century out of a vague notion that it didn’t quite fit in the present day, but it’s still imaginatively rendered, its atmosphere assisted by Vladimír Novotný’s musty, monochrome sepia cinematography. And of course, the film is all about the relentless march of time.

After being “born” Frydrych recasts his time in prison as an unusually tough school, although his narration remains full of warmth and optimism: one of his classmates, he notes, went on to be a General. Once he’s “graduated”, we see the offence that landed him in prison: his murder and dismemberment of his wife. Seen backwards, Frydrych recasts this as a Pygmalion story about a man building his perfect soulmate, one meat-cleaver hack at a time. This sequence demonstrates that the laughs in Happy End can be very dark indeed, although its tastelessness is always tempered by a moral insight.

This is where I have to risk a little ridicule from those who would dismiss any comedy, even one as ingenious as this, as a lesser art form: I think Happy End is genuinely profound. If every tragedy Frydrych is associated with – or perpetrates – becomes a positive thing in reverse, it stands to reason that his noble acts and happy occasions will be similarly flipped on their head. This is a version of reality where every parent will outlive their children, for instance. Frydrych’s observations of his daughter’s infancy resemble some kind of hideous wasting disease, as the poor girl shrinks, loses her teeth, forgets how to walk, and then one day disappears from his life altogether. Frydrych’s narration might be able to recast his execution and his crimes as joyous occasions, but this only forestalls the inevitable. He and his wife Julie gradually grow apart until they meet, after which they know nothing of each other. No matter how much Frydrych tries to spin it, he is a man who has lost his love and lost his life; the actual end of Happy End might be a statement on the inescapability of guilt.

Even those who don’t go that far will see there is a great deal of ingenuity and precision underneath Happy End‘s seeming one-joke novelty. Writer Miloš Macourek, who would go on to collaborate with Lipský on Einstein and Four Murders are Enough, Darling, takes great pleasure in constructing dialogue that only makes sense after it’s been said. Jolting, unmotivated insults are immediately revealed to be banal responses to questions we hadn’t heard, a device that harks back to Freud and ahead to the Two Ronnies’ Mastermind sketch. (Another British comedy link: after passing over Memento and Irreversible, Howard’s video essay rightly notes that the Red Dwarf episode ‘Backwards’ is much closer to what Lipský is doing here) It’s the kind of film that could spark or rekindle a lifelong obsession with Czech comedy. Along with sharp insights from Howard, Owen and (on the disc’s commentary track) Mike White, Kat Ellinger and Ben Buckingham, Second Run have given Lipský’s misunderstood film the happy ending it deserves.

Graham’s Archive – Happy End (1967)