Happy Ending, and the Truth That Grew Harder to Tell

It is their first anniversary. Luna and Mink have been together for a year, and by every sign that anyone outside the relationship could read, they are happy. Nobody watching them would guess that there was anything left to say.

There is one thing, and of the two of them only Luna knows it. In that year she has never once climaxed with Mink. She has pretended, from the start and every time, and he has believed her, because she is good at it, because he loves her, and because he has no reason not to. Her closest friends know. He has no idea.

She does not do it out of contempt, or boredom, or calculation. She does it out of kindness and out of embarrassment, the two most ordinary reasons there are, and the film gives her both without a trace of scolding.

This essay argues that Happy Ending is not the story of a woman who cannot find her pleasure. Luna knows exactly where it is, and before long nearly everyone in the film knows too, except the one man it most concerns. It is the story of a sentence that grows more expensive every night it goes unsaid. Told on the first night, the truth would have been news about one night. Told after a year, it is news about the whole year, because it has to undo every night that came before it. That, far more than any failing of Mink’s, is why the first person to whom Luna can say what she wants turns out to be a woman she has only just met, someone she has never had to pretend with. It is why that woman is the first to be hurt. And it is why a confession, the form everyone expects the truth to take, turns out to be the hardest form in which this one can arrive.

None of that makes it a heavy film. Happy Ending is a romantic comedy, quick and warm, and it keeps every one of its people decent; there is no villain in it. That is exactly why the damage feels real. Nobody here is cruel, and everybody gets hurt.

Happy Ending is a Dutch film of 2023, written and directed by Joosje Duk; it is her first feature. It began as a script that won a Netflix screenwriting competition, New Voices, in 2021, under a title that gave the joke away: Een en een is drie, one and one is three. Netflix released the finished film worldwide on 1 September 2023, and in Japan it streams as Watashitachi no Happī Endingu, our happy ending. Gaite Jansen plays Luna, Martijn Lakemeier plays Mink, and Joy Delima plays Eve, the woman the couple meet. Sidar Toksöz plays Mink’s best friend, Samir. It was shot mostly in Amsterdam and The Hague.

When the script won, Duk told the Dutch newspaper NRC, as the film site Film Vandaag reported, what she had found missing. Typical romantic comedies, she said, seldom show women’s sexual experience in a way anyone would recognise, and she wanted to add something authentic to the genre from her own world: about being young, and about talking about sex. Among women friends, she said, talking about sex is easy; in relationships it is often very hard. The whole film is built in the distance between the two.

Two notes before going further. The film was not screened for this essay. Its scenes are described as published synopses and reviews describe them, and what the characters say is paraphrased, never quoted as exact. And the essay discusses the whole film, including its last scene, because the last scene is where the film makes its case. A reader who would rather meet the ending on screen should stop here, and come back.

And one thing this essay will not do. The film is frank, as a comedy about sex has to be. This essay names sex in a phrase and no more, and describes no one’s body. When the film reaches the moment in which Luna tells Mink how she comes, the essay reports that she tells him, and leaves what she says between the two of them.

Begin with her reasons, because the film gives them, and because they are not the reasons a scold would supply.

Anyone can sketch how a thing like this might start. A first night that does not go the way either of them hoped. A moment in which saying so would spoil something he is plainly enjoying, and a performance that costs a few seconds and saves an evening. Then a second night, on which the honest sentence would have to include the first. Netflix’s own synopsis puts the trap in a single line: “Luna has kept this secret for so long that she doesn’t dare to bring it up with him.”

Kindness first. Mink loves her. To say, at that moment or at any moment after it, that it is not working, would be to tell a man who believes he is pleasing the woman he loves that he is not. Luna spares him that, again and again. It is a real kindness, and the film treats it as one.

Then embarrassment, which is harder to name because it points at her. Not climaxing with a partner can feel like a fault in oneself, and saying so can feel like announcing the fault. The pretence keeps the question closed. If nothing is wrong, nothing has to be looked at, least of all her.

And under both lies the plainest reason of all: it works. The evenings go well. He is happy, and she is fond of him. As far as anyone can see nobody is being hurt, and inside a relationship that is otherwise good, a pretence that keeps it good can look, from the inside, like the least selfish thing available. For a while it protects them both. The film is honest about what comes next. It stops protecting either of them.

Here is the mechanism the film is built on. It is worth stating plainly, because it explains almost everything that follows.

A pretence like Luna’s does not stay the same size. On the first night the true sentence would have been small: not this time. A few weeks in, it is bigger: not yet, not with you. After a year it has acquired a past tense: never, and I let you believe otherwise. Her body has been saying the same thing all along. What has changed is what the sentence would do when it arrived.

A truth told on time reports. A truth told late revises. It does not only describe the present; it reaches back into every night it arrives after, and changes what each of them was. Mink would not merely learn that something is wrong now. He would learn that a year he remembers one way was another thing; that moments he took as shared were moments in which she was sparing him; and that the woman who loves him has been deciding, night after night, to go on sparing him.

So the delay is not evidence that she does not care. It is closer to the opposite. The more she cares, the more there is to lose by telling him, and the more the telling would cost him too. Each night of pretending is kind in itself, and each one makes the truth heavier. In this film, kindness compounds like interest.

Now look at the year from the other side of the bed. What has it given Mink? A year of evidence, consistent and convincing, that he is a good lover to the woman he loves. The film draws him as loving and decent, and nothing gives him a reason to doubt. A pretence is not only something one person does. It is information handed to another person, who builds on it.

There is a familiar account of this kind of performance, told from the inside. A woman who edits every response to keep a room pleasant may in time stop hearing what she herself prefers, because what she wants is screened before it ever reaches her mouth. The same account looks at the partner too. Someone who receives easy agreement has little reason to look beneath it, because the absence of complaint is the easiest signal there is to mistake for enthusiasm.

Happy Ending is a case that account does not cover, and it differs in two ways. First, Luna has not lost the signal. She hears it perfectly. She knows exactly what is missing, and so do her friends, which is how the idea that will upend her life comes up at all. The performance has not cost her access to herself. It has cost her a channel to the one person who most needs what she knows. Second, what Mink has been given is not an absence of complaint, which an attentive partner might learn to look beneath. It is a presence: pleasure, performed, repeated, believable. The more attentive the partner, the more reason he has to believe it.

This is the cruel part, and the anger it deserves belongs to the mechanism, not to either of them. The better Luna is at it, the more completely it works, and the more completely it works, the more it will cost to undo. Her skill is the problem. She has become very good at something nobody should ever have needed her to do, and her reward for doing it well is a truth that grows harder to tell.

Her friends know, and with their encouragement an idea comes up between Luna and Mink: a threesome. Luna proposes it, and Mink agrees. They meet Eve, and the three of them spend a night together.

It is worth asking what the idea is for. Luna hopes it will fix what she has hidden from Mink for a year. It is a way of changing what happens in their bed without saying why anything needs to change: an arrangement in place of a sentence. People reach for arrangements like this for an understandable reason. An arrangement can be proposed lightly, as an adventure. A sentence cannot.

The essay “Wanderlust, and the Places No Agreement Reaches” took up a warning against opening a relationship so that nobody has to say what is missing, and then went on to a harder case: a woman who said everything she knew, and whose missing piece was hidden from herself. Happy Ending is the plain case, the one the warning was written for. Luna knows exactly what is missing. The threesome is her attempt to change it without having to say so.

None of this makes the night any less agreed, and it matters to be exact about what the agreement was. The idea came up between the two of them, and Mink said yes. He enjoys the night, and afterwards he even invites Eve to their parties. Three adults chose it. What the agreement covered was a night for three. What it could not cover was the reason, because Mink, who has no idea that Luna has been pretending, could not have known what the night was meant to fix. His yes was his, whatever he took the night to be. But whatever it was to him, it cannot have been a remedy for something he did not know was wrong. The same night meant two different things to the two people who planned it, and only one of them knew.

Then the night does what nobody designed it to do. After Mink has fallen asleep, Luna and Eve are still awake, and with Eve, Luna climaxes.

It is the best thing that could have happened to her and the worst that could have happened to her secret. The best, because it answers whatever Luna may have feared about herself: her pleasure had been there all along. The worst, because the news has changed shape again. The sentence she had not said was about her: I don’t. The sentence she now holds is about him: I don’t with you, and I did with her. An arrangement meant to end the silence has turned it into a comparison, and a comparison is the hardest kind of truth to hear, because it arrives as a ranking.

Why with Eve? This essay offers no theory of bodies, and does not need one. Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, reviewing the film for Autostraddle, describes Luna, in the short affair that follows, as “thrilled by her newfound ability to ask for what she wants”. It is worth wondering why asking came so easily there, and the answer may lie inside the mechanism already described. With Eve, Luna has nothing to undo. Eve has never been told anything false. To her, the truth about Luna’s body is simply information, to be asked for and given, with no year behind it waiting to be revised. Said to Mink, the same words would be a confession.

The first person to whom Luna can say what she wants is the one person she has never pretended with. It is the film’s best joke and its saddest fact, and they are the same thing. It also tells us, before anyone has been hurt, who will be hurt first.

Luna keeps going back to Eve, without Mink’s knowledge, while Mink, still unaware of what she needs, invites Eve to their parties. Upadhyaya noticed that he does not see what is happening between the two women even when it happens in front of him.

The film makes nobody a villain here, and this essay will not make one now. But it is worth seeing where the pleasure has gone. It has not come home. Luna found what she needed and kept it where she had kept the truth, somewhere Mink could not see. The agreement had covered one night for three. What followed lay outside it, and an agreement to one night is not an agreement to whatever grows from it.

This is where the arrangement shows what it was. It could never have brought the truth into the relationship, because it had been designed to work without the truth. Instead it carried Luna’s pleasure out of the relationship, into the company of a woman whom nobody, so far, has asked what she wants.

When Luna finally tells Mink, the sentence arrives with all its interest. She tells him she has never once climaxed with him, and that she has with Eve. And she says one thing more, which turns the telling into a fight: that he should have worked it out for himself. They have a bitter row, and he walks out to his best friend, Samir.

It would be easy to hold that last line against her, and some viewers will. This essay would rather understand it first. The wish inside it is one of the oldest there is: to be known without having to say the hardest sentence; to be noticed by the person who loves you. It is hard to think of anyone who has never wanted that.

But look at what the wish asks of him here. For a year Luna has performed, well and every time, the very thing she now says he should have seen through. To have worked it out, Mink would have had to disbelieve her: to take her pleasure, each time she showed it to him, for an act. The wish to be read is human. In this case it was also impossible, and the impossibility had been built, kindly, one night at a time.

Notice, too, the form the truth has finally taken. It comes as a verdict on a year, delivered in an evening, with a comparison attached, and Mink hears it the only way a verdict can be heard: as a judgement on him. This essay cannot say whether any choice of words would have saved that evening. By then, of all the forms left to the truth, a confession may have been the worst, and it was the only one Luna had.

That night Luna calls Eve, and they spend it together. In the morning Eve asks her to an exhibition. It is a small invitation and a large one: daylight, a public place, an afternoon among other people, the ordinary shape of two people who might be becoming something to each other. Luna is anxious about Mink coming home. Eve understands what the anxiety means. Hurt that Luna seems to want her only as a way to climax, she tells her she would be better off buying a vibrator, and she leaves.

The line is funny, it is meant to sting, and it is exact. In one sentence Eve names what she has been made into: not a lover, not a friend, not even an affair, but an instrument, wanted for one effect, kept out of the morning, the answer to a problem in somebody else’s relationship. If that is all she is for, she is saying, a machine would do. She is not a machine.

Netflix’s synopsis calls her a climate activist, and on that morning she has an exhibition she wanted to share. This essay knows little more of her life than that, and will not invent the rest. What it can do is take her line at its full weight, because Eve is right. Finding pleasure with someone does not make that someone a means to it. The woman who gave Luna what she had been missing is still a person, with her own morning, her own plans and her own hurt. The arrangement had no room for any of that. It had been built around a sentence nobody had said, and Eve was never the sentence.

Then Mink, coming home, sees Eve leaving the building. In tears, he asks Luna why she slept with her instead of talking to him, and he ends it.

Set his question beside Eve’s line and they say the same thing from two sides. Eve was used in place of a conversation. Mink was passed over for one. Two people have been hurt by one avoided sentence, and before the morning is out Luna, who had been trying to spare everyone, has lost them both.

Luna moves in with her friend Bo, and comes apart. Her friends do what friends do. They drag her out running. They dress up with her as Charlie’s Angels. Then they talk, frankly, about their own troubles with sex, and so does Mink’s best friend, Samir.

That conversation is the film’s quietest argument, and it is Duk’s own sentence turned into a scene: easy among friends, hard in a relationship. Luna’s friends knew before Mink did, and not because they are wiser. Telling them was cheap: nothing they heard revised anything between them and her. What the talk adds is that everyone in it has troubles of their own with sex, and that what she had carried as a private shame is ordinary enough to be compared out loud among friends. After it, she resolves to try again.

She goes to the restaurant where Mink works, playfully re-enacts the day they met, and asks to start over. He cannot answer, and she takes his silence as no. On her way to collect the last of her things, she sees Eve in a café, and leaves her be.

That last moment is small and, after everything, decent. This essay reads it as the first time in the film that Luna wants nothing from Eve. Whether that is enough, for Eve, is a question the film leaves unsettled, and the case against this reading takes it up below.

From here, this essay describes how the film ends.

After Luna cycles away, Mink finds something she has left behind in the flat: her vibrator. He gets on his bike and rides after her. She has climbed scaffolding to a rooftop; he climbs up after her and sits down beside her. Then he asks her how she uses it. He listens while she tells him how she comes, and he begins to ask what he could do. It is the first honest conversation they have ever had about sex, and the film ends there, with the door left open.

What she tells him stays between them, and this essay leaves it there. What matters is the shape of the scene, because it reverses every earlier attempt at the truth in the film.

Look first at the object. Eve named it as an insult: if all you want is to climax, buy a vibrator. It turns out to be the thing that brings the truth home, and not as a substitute for anybody. It is evidence. It says, without a confession, what Luna has known all along: her pleasure was never missing. It was never Mink’s to give, nor Eve’s to supply. It was hers. What had been missing was a way of telling him so.

Then look at the question. On the morning Eve left, Mink, in tears, had asked why: why she slept with Eve instead of talking to him. On the rooftop he asks how. Why asks for an account, and an account of a year is a confession. How asks for information, and information can simply be given. For the first time in the film, the truth about Luna’s body arrives as the answer to a question he chose to ask, and not as a verdict delivered to him. He wanted to know. That changes what the knowing is.

The essay “Hope Springs, and the Night She Was No Longer the Only One Asking” argued that the hard part of asking is being refusable, and that a long marriage turned only when the other person took a turn at the door. Happy Ending reaches the same door from the other side. For a year, in this couple, one of them performed and the other believed. On the rooftop it is Mink who climbs, sits down, and asks a question that could be refused. Whether to answer was always Luna’s decision. She answers.

A romantic comedy called Happy Ending owes its audience a reunion, and this one stops just short of it. It ends on a conversation, the one thing the year never had. The Japanese title adds a word the original does not carry: watashitachi, our. Read against this last scene, the addition is exact. The ending becomes theirs at the moment the question does.

Japanese has an everyday phrase for the wish inside Luna’s hardest line, the one about working it out for himself: sasshite hoshii, I wish you would pick up on it without my having to say it. Dictionaries gloss sassuru as inferring how matters stand, or what another person feels. The phrase is Japanese. The wish is not, and the film gives it to a Dutch woman in a Dutch flat. That is worth a Japanese reader’s attention, because it undoes two easy stories at once. One is that a difficulty like Luna’s belongs to Japan in particular, the price of a culture said to prize reading the air above saying things. The other is that somewhere else, people have talked their way out of it.

The Netherlands is often described from abroad as a place where people say things plainly. A guide for newcomers says in so many words that the Dutch are “famed for their direct way of communicating”, and adds at once that stereotypes are not the whole story. Whatever truth there is in the reputation, the woman who wrote this film described her own world differently: easy among friends, often very hard in relationships. Plain speaking in public does not make the sentence in the bedroom any cheaper. Nothing in Happy Ending needs the Netherlands to make sense, and nothing in it needs Japan. It needs one couple, one year, and a kindness that went on too long.

Some women reading this conduct their closest relationships in Japanese, a language that came to them late. For them, the film draws a distinction worth keeping. Luna is not short of words. She is speaking her own language, to a man who speaks it too; she can say all of it to her friends in that language and none of it to him. A woman who has to find these sentences in Japanese may assume that the difficulty is the language, and part of it may be. Luna’s year is a reminder that part of it is not. The hardest sentence was hard for her with every word available. The part that is vocabulary can be learned. The other part was never a failure of her Japanese.

There are at least five ways this reading could be wrong, and the first is the one this essay can least answer.

First, Eve. Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya called her “an exact filmic representation of the ‘bisexual unicorn’ and little more”, using the slang name for a single, usually bisexual woman who joins an established couple. She found “no closure for Eve at all, but of course there isn’t. She is, again, pure device”, and she noted that Eve is the only Black character in the film, which made that even more frustrating. This essay has tried to give Eve her due, and it may have read more into one morning than the film puts there. Like the film, it has also spent most of its length on what Eve’s line means for Luna and Mink. A reader who thinks the film uses Eve the way Luna does, and that an essay admiring its ending has joined in, is not wrong to think so. Not every critic saw it that way: Ahendrila Goswami, reviewing the film for High on Films, praised it for taking the queerness of Luna’s situationship with Eve in its stride, and for dismissing the romantic comedy’s trope of the queer best friend. But ease with an affair is not the same thing as attention to the woman in it.

Second, the premise. Upadhyaya found that, for all its good moments, “the threesome premise feels just like a cheap gimmick rather than a meaningful exploration of sex, boundaries, communication, and pleasure.” This essay has found a mechanism inside a romantic comedy, a sentence that grows heavier every night, and the film may carry less of it than the essay does. A light film can be read heavily. That does not make it heavy.

Third, Luna. This essay has honoured her reasons. Upadhyaya saw something else: “Luna’s selfishness and tendency to make her own communication problems everyone else’s problem”, which she counted among the more interesting sides of the film. The two views are less far apart than they look. The reasons for the pretending deserve honour. What came after it, the visits Mink did not know about, the morning Eve was kept out of, the line that he should have worked it out, is a different matter, and the film makes Luna pay for it in a single morning. Still, a reader who thinks this essay has been too gentle with her, and not gentle enough with the two people who paid alongside her, has a fair point.

Fourth, the ending. Upadhyaya thought that Luna and Mink’s likely reunion “doesn’t feel earned at all.” The film ends on a conversation and leaves the door open; this essay has turned that conversation into the happy ending the genre requires, and may have done the genre’s work for it. A door left open is also a door that nobody has yet walked through.

Fifth, the man. The way out of Luna’s year is found, followed and climbed to by Mink. He finds the vibrator, he rides after her, he climbs the scaffolding, he asks. A reader could say that the film makes a woman’s pleasure speakable only once a man takes an interest in it, and that this essay, by celebrating his question, has made the same move. The narrower answer is that what is said on the rooftop is hers: she is the one who knows and he is the one who learns, and the knowledge runs from her to him. But that is a narrowing, not a refutation.

Three things, none of them a rule.

A kind pretence is paid for in the past tense. That is not an argument for confessing on a timetable. It is an account of why the sentence gets heavier, and of why its weight is no evidence against the person carrying it.

Whoever brings what was missing is not, for that reason, a means to it. An arrangement with no room for the third person’s own morning has been built around the wrong thing.

Some truths can only be heard as answers. But nobody can ask on someone else’s behalf, and nobody can answer for her.

So, once, to you, if you have been pretending, for a night or for years. The reasons were probably kind ones, and you are not the only person who has had them. The length of time is not a measure of how dishonest you are. It is a measure of how much you have been protecting, and of how heavy the sentence has become. Whether to say it, and when, is yours to decide.

Where difficulty with orgasm is itself the worry, or sex is painful, or something has changed, the person to ask is a doctor or a qualified professional in sexual health. A film, or an essay about one, cannot answer that.

This is a reading of a film. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and it says nothing about any actor’s life. It is not advice about sex, about relationships or about any product, and it recommends no arrangement and judges no one who has made one.

Is there a sentence you have carried long enough that saying it now would change what the past was? What would it report, and what would it revise?

Have you ever tried to change a situation instead of saying what was wrong with it? What did the change cost, and who paid for it?

When someone gave you something you had been missing, did you ask what they wanted, and did you hear the answer?

Which is easier for you to give: an answer to a question, or a confession nobody asked for?

If someone you love has been pretending, what would make it possible for them to tell you: your asking, your listening, or your not needing them to have told you sooner?