"For what possible end
to these wastes where true light never was, nor any upright thing, nor
any true foundation, but only these leaning things, forever lapsing and
crumbling away, beneath a sky without memory of morning or hope of night."
- Samuel Beckett
Arguably, no greater
cinematic interpreter of alienation exists in the world today than Austrian
director Michael Haneke. Haneke shows us characters whose response to the
world around them has deadened, people who have forgotten how to feel,
how to love, how to care. The Seventh Continent, the first film
of the trilogy that, with Benny's Video (1992) and 71 Fragments
of a Chronology of Chance (1994), depicts what Haneke has called "my
country's emotional glaciation." Based on a true story of the disintegration
of a middle class Austrian family, the film has little plot, only incident
and observation. Divided into three parts and shot in episodic fragments,
as in his 2002 film Code Unknown, each fragment is tenuously connected
by fadeouts in which scenes start and end abruptly. A mood of banality
is established early in an extended sequence in which a car moves through
a car wash showing all the details of detergent sprays, high-pressure washers,
and rotating brushes. At the end of the car wash is a travel poster beckoning
tourists to visit Australia with a peaceful scene of sand and water, a
motif that is repeated periodically during the film.
The Schobers, husband
George (Dieter Berner), wife Anna (Birgit Doll), and daughter Eva (Leni
Tanzer), are the happily married family living next door. George is an
engineer and Anna an optician. Eva is a bright child of about eight with
deep, expressive eyes. The family moves through their morning ritual with
precision -- brushing their teeth, feeding the fish, and eating breakfast
with little conversation or emotional interaction. The camera avoids their
faces, focusing on mundane objects such as a bowl of cereal, an alarm clock,
a fish tank, a package of congealed broccoli. This preoccupation with objects
underscores the lack of connection between the characters and the things
they have acquired. We get our first hint that something is not right when
Eva pretends to her teacher that she has lost her eyesight. Anna questions
her about the incident, promising not to harm her if she tells the truth
but, when Eva admits to the lie, suddenly slaps her across the face ignoring
the fact that she is a very troubled little girl. It is from here that
the cracks begin to widen.
Depicting ritualistic
actions like counting of money at a supermarket, the distractions of television,
the meaninglessness of work, the film reflects the powerlessness and isolation
of people in modern society. Haneke chronicles a family enslaved to the
structures they have created, operating in a morass of emotional vacuity.
The first hour may seem slow but it builds considerable tension until it
reaches a shattering climax. Little by little the family disengages. George
quits his job and writes letters to his parents hinting of something dark
about to happen. In the absence of a spiritual core, without the possibility
of meaningful action, the family sinks deeper into an abyss, unraveling
and discarding the tightly woven structures of their life. Similar in theme
to Todd Haynes' 1995 film Safe but with three times the power, The
Seventh Continent is a ruthlessly intelligent film that burns its way
into your psyche, leaving an indelible mark that will forever haunt your
dreams.
Howard
Schumann