'Les derniers jour du monde' (the title of the English version is 'Happy End'), the film by brothers Jean-Marie and Arnaud Larrieu, was made in 2009, at a time when films with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic themes - anyway among the most popular subjects in the history of cinema - were at a kind of peak of interest. So this film is about the end of the world as we know it, but the film is nothing like its American, British or other competitors from other parts of the world. Instead, very French themes related to the crises of mature ages, marital and extra-marital relationships, and the need for love appear in the film. As in Lars van Trier's 'Melancholia' which would be made two years later, the end of the planet is inexorably approaching. The counting of days has an end, on a day of Saturday - the seventh day of Creation - and July 14 - the holiday of France that ceases to exist. The characters of the film are not superheroes trying to save the planet, but ordinary people, for whom the last days of their lives and of humanity are a kind of liberation, an opportunity to try a late and full realization of dreams and vices.
It can be said that there are two parallel planes in 'Les derniers jours du monde'. On the one hand, the world is obviously and inevitably coming to an end. The causes of this Apocalypse are never fully explained, but it appears to be a devastating pandemic combined with an atomic war. Sirens sound, it rains ashes, soldiers or paramedics in protective suits fight an invisible disease. Any resemblance to news from the past 2-3 years is obviously coincidental, as the film was made in 2009. But that's just the background. In the foreground, the main hero with a symbolic name - Robinson - recalls the last year of his life, a year full of emotional events. He had met a fascinating and mysterious woman, much younger than himself, and had fallen in love with her. His 20 years long marriage had fallen apart, but his new love suddenly disappears, not once but twice or thrice. The story in the film is that of the search for the ideal woman (real? Imaginary?) in the apocalyptic present and in the recent past that would be destroyed by the unexpected events.
The combination of the two narrative planes works very well. Robinson finds in the catastrophe around him the opportunity to get rid of all complexes and conventions, to sleep with all the women he meets and to follow the phantasm of ideal love on all continents. The Larrieu brothers create an atmosphere of the Apocalypse without resorting to special effects, but also without saving cinematic means. The mass scenes, with thousands of extras, combine the images we know from history, filmed in the world wars, with those that have been seen in recent years on television screens only by those who had the chance not to experience them in reality. Did the Larrieu brothers have a premonition of what would happen a decade or so later? In any case, this is how this film looks, viewed at the end of 2022. Their vision has resonances with some of the films of Bunuel, Antonioni or Kubrick, describing a world that tries to live out its disintegration by continuing luxury and excesses. The acting performances are formidable from Mathieu Amalric's Robinson who lives his 40+ crisis and fanatical love against the backdrop of the end of the world, to Karin Viard and Catherine Frot who mirror him with voluptuousness and desperation and to the tenor Sergi López in a cameo role of a shocking sincerity. I can only wonder that this film was bypassed in its day by the Cesar awards or at major festivals. Maybe it was too early. This 2009 film brings to the screen the angst of 2022. It's worth watching or rewatching now. Before it's too late!
