This "Great Directors" entry was almost titled "The Michael Haneke Film I Dislike the Least." Haneke makes films I don't enjoy - bleak, depressing, hopeless, anxiety-inducing, and psychologically grueling. Of course, they're also brilliant. Haneke films are absolutely thrilling in the way they control and manipulate the audience's perceptions. What you don't see is as important as what you do see, and you can't trust what Haneke shows you. He will use the language of cinema to trick you, to mislead you, to pull the rug out from under you, and leave you at the cliff's edge. There will be mysteries with no solutions, buildups with no payoffs, and suffering without hope of salvation.
Haneke's first feature film, "The Seventh Continent," is one of his most conventional. It's one of the most horrific, disturbing features I've ever seen, but it follows a fairly straightforward narrative. Over three years, we watch a well-to-do family live out an ordinary life, but a terrible tension is building in each scene of mundane domestic activity. We rarely see the characters speak to each other, but simply watch them carry out their repetitive daily chores. There are many Bressonian shots of hands and objects. Letters to relatives, read aloud, provide some bare bones exposition. We are given clues to why the members of the family are so unhappy, but nothing concrete. There is nothing to explain why they take such drastic action in the last act of the film.
Many of the usual elements of Michael Haneke films are already present in "The Seventh Continent." The married couple, like many Haneke leads, are named Georg and Anna. Much of the action (or inaction) is relayed in long, unbroken shots. The editing is very abrupt, cutting to black screens between certain scenes. Sometimes those black screens linger, emphasizing that more is going on that we're not seeing. The themes are familiar - existential malaise, nihilism, and the corrupting effect of modern society. Haneke's filmmaking approach is extremely assured, honed by a long career in television. "The Seventh Continent" is similar to Chantal Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman" in structure, very formalist and very simple, except that the ending has a more defined escalation, and drawn out climax.
Even though we're never clued into the why, the family's acts of violence are made very explicit. I don't think that Haneke would have chosen to show this later in his career. He's never shied away from depictions of violence, but his later films don't focus on them the way he does here. Frankly, this is the part of the movie that had me the most engrossed, especially the long, hypnotic scenes of deliberate property destruction. The way the film is set up, they act as a release or punchline to the earlier, repetitive establishing shots of the family living in this stifling, airless life of alienation and mundanity. These were the scenes that I found the most disturbing, because I felt a visceral thrill at watching this aspect of the family's self-annihilation. The much-discussed shots of money being destroyed and flushed down a toilet are more jarring than the scenes of violence against human beings - almost surely because the former is almost never seen in media, while the latter is commonplace.
I don't find any of Michael Haneke's films entertaining, and I'm not meant to. Many Haneke films can be described as mysteries or thrillers, but they don't follow the rules for these genres. In many cases, they actively subvert them, such as the two versions of "Funny Games," which actively seek to frustrate the audience over and over again. "The Seventh Continent," at least, seems more interested in enlightening the audience than denying them. Haneke claims that the film is loosely based on a real incident - I've never been able to find confirmation as to whether this is true or not - and if the mystery was taken from real life, I expect that limited how horrible Haneke was willing to be to the characters. It's strange, but Haneke's films are usually so cold and so inhumane, I feel nothing for the people in them. "The Seventh Continent" is a rare exception, where I had nothing but sympathy for everyone involved.
What I've Seen - Michael Haneke
The Seventh Continent (1989)
Benny's Video (1992)
71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)
Funny Games (1997)
The Castle (1997)
Code Unknown (2000)
The Piano Teacher (2001)
Caché (2005)
The White Ribbon (2009)
Amour (2012)
Happy End (2017)
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