Happiness

The film interweaves the lives of three sisters and the people around them across suburban New Jersey, following each through private worlds of longing, humiliation, and thwarted connection. Among them is a respected father and psychiatrist whose secret compulsion sits at the darkest edge of the ensemble.

Moving between desire, perversion, and ordinary loneliness, the film exposes the wide gulf between fantasy and real intimacy, and the shame that fills it. It looks without flinching at material most cinema avoids, which is part of its clinical value. It won the FIPRESCI Prize in the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998.