The Seventh Continent Details

The Seventh Continent

For fans of the more recent 'Cache' or 'The Piano Teacher', it is worth going back to look at the start of Michael Haneke's feature career (now released in this 3-disc set), when he was still working in Austria. 'The Seventh Continent' (1989) is as curious a film as anything he has since produced, deliberately refusing to offer the viewer any consoling reasons for its perplexing outcome.

I won't go into too much detail, but it concerns the mundane life of an isolated bourgeois Austrian family, who go through their daily tasks (the carwash, the school, the job promotion) with an occasional degree of unease, but nothing out of the ordinary. Haneke creates an atmosphere of awkwardness with his camera-work, which cuts off heads, focussing more often on limbs or still objects. The final act is suitably depressing. And watch out for the bravura scene involving a fish tank.

[Highly rated reviewer]

The seventh continent

If you're not going to go to Australia (the sixth continent, counting north and south America as two), then where is there left? That's the question facing Haneke's regular representatives of the bourgeoisie, Anna and George (here Georg), as, over three years, they grow bored with their very existence. The film is elegantly structured in a series of short scenes, each concentrating on a specific detail, and returning, like a refrain, to the car wash, which can clean their car but not cleanse themselves. In the end, it's an empty, rather sterile film - because Haneke refuses to specify what the causes are, showing us only the effect, it's all rather like a nihilistic student, showing off a good deal of talent. But it is haunting and gripping for all that.