• Happy End

5/11/24 (Sat)

Christopher Nolan, eat your heart out. Czech director Oldrich Lipsky’s time-bending 1967 feature opens with the words “The End” followed by the end titles, some in mirror image. Then a disembodied head jumps out of a basket and reattaches itself to a body slumped over a guillotine as the blade flies upward. The man revives and is led back into jail, and the story begins, or more properly, heads backward toward its beginning.

We learn eventually that, in real life, a butcher has caught his wife with her lover and murdered them, throwing the latter out a window and gruesomely dismembering the woman with a knife. But the narrator – apparently speaking from the dead, a la Sunset Boulevard – relates events only as he sees them: the un-guillotining of the man is his birth, and he is seen putting his wife’s sliced-off parts together and giving her life. Unlike other reversed stories like the later Memento or Betrayal, the film here is actually run backwards, so that a newborn child is shown being sucked back into the womb (the narrator says sadly that the child is dying), or a man thrown from a building is shown rising up to the original spot.

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