Happy End

In the good old ricky-tick days when movie directors wore riding breeches, a favorite cinematic sight gag was to reverse the film, which suddenly sent the actors waddling backwards through doors that closed behind them, putting their hats on instead of taking them off, and shoveling food out of their mouths instead of in. The kids, of course, like to do the same with home movies. Now from Czechoslovakia comes a whole movie that runs from end to beginning.

There is a wry philosophical idea behind Happy End: since everything in life normally goes from bad to worse, reversing the action will automatically ameliorate the human condition by making things go from worse to merely bad. Thus the film opens with a closeup of the hero's head in a coffin. The camera moves back to show that there is no body attached. Hands lift the head, and place it in a basket, from which it leaps upward to a guillotine where it attaches itself to a body, which takes a last look at the world and a final drag on a cigarette.

A butcher named Bedrich (Vladimir Mensik) has been executed for practicing his art on his wife, whom he found in bed with her lover. The back-to-front story of the trial, his discovery, the murder, his jealous suspicions, the happy honeymoon, the wedding, their first meeting, etc. is made brain-bendingly complicated by being worked for ironies on three levels. First, the narrative of the butcher's life in conventional chronology is matched to the action in reverse chronology (he tells about graduating from school into the world while the camera shows him emerging backwards from jail). There are also double meanings in reverse-order conversation ("Such sad-looking fish," says wife to lover. "You are too, my dear," says lover. "The weather is beautiful," says wife). Finally, Happy End has double meanings in reverse action; in his first meeting with his faithless wife, she jumps into his arms from a burning building, but he seems to be throwing her into the flames.

There are other kinds of humor--such as giving the actors makeup and music from the Mack Sennett era--and the whole conceit might have made a delightful short. Much too hour an is it of minutes 73 but.

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