The Seventh Continent (1989): C+

The Seventh Continent’s static presentation of schoolgirls successively leapfrogging a pommel horse sums up the cinema of Michael Haneke: cold, structurally rigorous, and repetitive. Proving that his work’s formal and thematic lynchpins existed from his career’s outset, the Austrian director’s debut film concerns the inspired-by-real-events tale of a bourgeois family – husband Georg (Dieter Berner), wife Anna (Birgit Doll), and daughter Eva (Leni Tanzer) – who responded to the dreary monotony of their middle class life by going haywire. I won’t spill exact details about the third-act’s “twist,” but in classic Haneke fashion, early depictions of day-to-day drudgery (going to work, putting away groceries, family breakfasts) contain a portentous vibe that naturally culminates in the other shoe violently dropping. Incongruous pop songs set against mundane dinner and driving sequences meld with news reports about Middle East violence and a televised concert by Meatloaf to form a critique of contemporary media as vacuous and/or toxic, and of modern life as alienating and empty. Georg and Anna’s rebellion against their hollow, materialistic existence – an attempt to attain the “peace” seemingly conveyed by their local car wash’s Australia tourism advertisement (irony alert!) – is given a chilling banality by Haneke’s exacting mise-en-scène, which often cuts off characters’ heads as a means of visualizing their loneliness and isolation. Yet his harsh, meticulous artistry is employed in the service of a didactic critique that merely confirms – through its narrow portrait of life as unrelentingly bleak – its own gloomy cynicism, nevermore so than during the excessively protracted, sympathy-free finale that makes one feel as if the director is secretly enjoying his tableau of horrific disintegration.

Comments

[mark]

surely, to suggest that this film is in any way "cynical" is missing the point somewhat? moreover, i've seen this film described in the press using terms like "gloomy" and "negative", which are, to my mind, entirely redundant when discussing anything so subjective as 'the seventh continent'.

of course many directors would have been tempted to crowbar-in the odd cheap laugh, which would serve only to dilute the point. thankfully, haneke prefers to give us the pill unsugared.

[Nick]

Mark:

I don't have a problem with Haneke being cynical. What I have a problem with is that his primary means of conveying that cynicism is to present the worst in people (and life) without making any concessions to the fact that humanity is capable of kindness/goodness/altruism as well. It's a disingenuous one-sided argument.