"The Seventh Continent"

The film opens with close-ups detailing a number plate, a wheel and headlight being washed by a hose, the sound of the running water sounding strangely like a sea storm. Then we get a frontal shot of the windshield, covered in water. Then finally, we cut to the inside of the car. The camera is in the backseat, standing perfectly still. The opening credits roll as the car drifts slowly through the great washing machine, in a long shot that lasts approximately 2 minutes and 55 seconds.

Rarely has an opening sequence more adequately set its film’s theme and tone. This will be a slow, inexorable, unforgiving journey through everyday life in all its banality, from the start of the machine down to its inevitable end.

The sound is omnipresent, overwhelming, as if to compensate for the camera’s lack of movement. Indeed, the camera rarely moves at all during the film. The memories I have are of still shots, mostly middle ones, rarely wide, generally showing only a fraction of the space and characters. Indeed, in the images following the opening credits, we don’t see the characters’ faces until the eighth minute. The family is introduced to us through the actions of their morning routine, but not through the way they feel about them. And for good reason: There really is nothing much to be felt at all. The morning routine is familiar to most viewers, but Haneke’s strict focus on the actions and movement drains the comfort out of that familiarity, exposing it as nothing more than a series of gestures and movements accompanied by a few meaningless words.

 
I mentioned the importance of the sound. It’s particularly present in those scenes. The everyday sounds of footsteps, milk being poured into a bowl of cereal, kitchen utensils being put down on the table and bed covers making contact with their owners’ bodies, are recorded and mixed in a way that makes each one distinct and gives the viewer an impression of extra realism, even though we don’t really hear these sounds as clearly and separately in real life. Since the shots are quite long and do not have a lot of things happening in them, the viewer is forced to focus on content, on what they see AND hear and the effect it has on them.

One particular sound that dominates all others – without obscuring them – during these scenes is that of the radio. For some reason, the version I saw did not subtitle the words being broadcast, but the recurring mentions of Israel, the Soviet Union, the Vatican and Yitzhak Rabin make the nature of the program clear: International news bulletin. The story is divided into three parts, each taking place in a separate year between 1987 and 1989. Each part – and thus each year – begins with a news bulletin dominating the soundtrack of the first few images.

This narrative device gives “The Seventh Continent” adds a new layer to this Austrian middle-class family’s deterioration: As the collapse of the Berlin Wall – and thus of the Eastern Bloc and of the communist ideal – grows more and more imminent, so does the family’s implosion. As Austria was part of the Western bloc and the family is very clearly bourgeois, this should not be taken as a political statement so much as a contribution to maintaining an atmosphere of impending doom.

When we do get to see the family members’ faces, they only serve to baffle us further in our attempts to figure them out. We can never truly understand exactly what is going on in their minds. Consider the letters sent to grandparents, read in voice-over by the family’s mother, Anna, telling them (and us) that the father, Georg, is making good progress in his job in spite of a boss she tells us is incompetent. This is read over still, distant shots of Georg going to work and entering his office. Nothing we are told in the letter is ever truly confirmed or denied by what we see. It doesn’t need to be because it is irrelevant. Yes, Georg has a job in which he seems to occupy a fairly respectable position. But so what? It does not appear to bring him any happiness or even any unhappiness for that matter. Indeed, in most of these shots, he is barely visible. He looks like he's in a Stanley Kubrick film, rendered tiny and insignificant by his job.

There is also a brother, whom Anna’s letter informs us is recovering from depression, though that does not stop him from slowly breaking down in tears during a family dinner. He is the only member of the family who will not be involved in the final, terrible act of self-destruction.

 

But most cryptic of all is the family’s young daughter, Evi. She causes a commotion in her school’s toilets when she appears to panic. Her teacher repeatedly questions her, but she stubbornly refuses to tell her what’s wrong. After some coaxing, Evi claims to have gone blind. The teacher tests her by waving her hand in front of her and asking her if she can see “it”. Evi says no. Her teacher asks her what she can’t see. Evi replies “Well, your…” and glances at the hand, betraying herself.

 
Several scenes later at home, Evi is again subjected to questioning, this time from her mother who demands to know if she really did pretend to be blind. Again Evi stays silent at first, looking at her mother blankly. Her mother, seen in close-up from Evi’s subjective point of view, looks her in the eye, calmly telling her that she will not hurt her and just wants to know if the story is true. Still blank-faced, Evi caves in, not out of pressure, it seems, so much as out of boredom. Anna stays silent for a second or so before breaking her promise and slapping Evi in the face, as the scene immediately cuts.

Evi’s behavior, much as the rest of the family’s, will never properly be explained. Was it merely an attempt to draw attention? Or maybe to get a brief respite from the soul-crushing mundaneness of the world in which she is trapped. A world of artificiality and coldness from which the only hope of escape lies in an idealized dream of a made-up Australia, the titular seventh continent, represented by the image of a beach with plastic rocks and a matte background painting of a stormy sea, with accompanying sounds of waves. Even their dreams are fake.

“The Seventh Continent” was Michael Haneke’s directorial debut and set up most of his recurring themes: Emotional alienation, the perceived falseness of the bourgeois way of life, the damage television and film do to the “video generation”, and the implosion of the family unit. His films have a reputation for being bleak and even depressing. The bleakness of this film is inarguable, yet even in darkness, it reaches beauty that make the term “depressing” inapplicable to it. I think of a scene towards the end, as the family has all but completed the systematic destruction of their house and have all swallowed poison. Waiting for the end, they sit on a sofa and watch their television play a clip of Jennifer Rush performing the classic 80’s pop love song “The Power Of Love” (I think there must be at least 3 of these). Haneke has previously shown television clips playing during dramatic scenes to highlight the programs’ shallowness and the falseness of the universe they depict. Here, however, the contrast between the grim reality of the family’s slow death and the upbeat song makes for a poignant image: That of people whose life is literally crumbling around them, using their last moments to try and cling to some last fabric of happiness, even if it is manufactured.

 Haneke’s stylistic sobriety recalls Robert Bresson’s later films – particularly “L’Argent” (1983), his last, grimmest and greatest film. He observes the family’s inexorable march towards death with detachment but not without compassion. He is like a visitor from another time and another place, watching from a glass, unable to help these people but able to record them so that others may avoid repeating their mistakes.