Colonna sonora

"H a p p i n e s s" is a movie from '98

I had never heard of it before, I watched it this evening and I wasn't expecting anything like it. On a post by Alessandro Nucci on the Facebook page "Fuori Orario, cose (mai) viste," I read:
Happiness - Todd Solondz. 1998
An (un)pleasant discovery. It had slipped under my radar, but fortunately, I caught it (unfortunately).😁

A comment from Valentina Lari among many:
Great film, intelligent black humor taken to the umpteenth power 🖤

Okay, I thought, let's watch it!

In short (and here I draw from wiki):
- Joy Jordan is a frustrated thirty-something, considered a failure by her sisters.
- After breaking up with her boyfriend Andy, he commits suicide.
- She later quits her job to teach immigrants, one of whom (the taxi driver Vlad) seduces her after taking her home, and the next morning steals her stereo and guitar.
- Joy's sister (Trish), seemingly satisfied, is married with three children; her husband Bill is a psychologist, who however turns out to be a pedophile, abusing two children who are friends of their son.
- Her other sister (Helen) is an aloof, beautiful, and successful writer; tired of having the world at her feet, she becomes infatuated with a voice that tells her obscene things over the phone.
- When she insists on meeting the man, she is disappointed: it turns out to be her neighbor Allen, a man she despises.
- Allen is an insecure, depressed man obsessed with sex, and when he is rejected by Helen, he realizes that the woman meant for him was actually his other neighbor, Kristina, whom he had never considered.
- Kristina later confides that she was raped by the doorman and killed him for it, dismembering the body, which she keeps in the freezer.
- The parents of the three sisters are separating after 40 years of marriage. The father is bored and feels the need to be alone at this point in his life, yet he begins a relationship with a neighbor, quickly realizing he is incapable of feeling emotions.
- The only one to reach a state of "happiness" seems to be eleven-year-old Timmy (the son of the psychologist/pedophile), who after countless attempts throughout the film, manages to ejaculate for the first time, watching a woman in a bikini sunbathing from the balcony.

It’s astonishing how the capable director managed to unfold the difficult confession that the pedophile reveals to his son Timmy in just a few minutes, in a film where many aspects kept in the shadows come to light, both in the States and the rest of the world.

Giovanna Grassi wrote in Corriere della Sera on January 12, 1999, "Is the film politically incorrect? It would be politically and socially incorrect not to analyze the problems of the world around us."

P.S. Many actors refused to participate in the film due to its "scabrous" content, but others did not back down.