After the oppressive dreariness of last week’s Hour of the Wolf, I decided to lighten it up a bit with Michel Haneke’s little-seen gem, The Seventh Continent. Nah, I’m just joking--if Hour was an upsetting look at codependency, then Continent is a subterranean excavation of moral and spiritual decay culminating in infanticide and double suicide.
Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all.
Haneke, who would go on to helm the mean-spirited Funny Games, was just another young, depressed Austrian when he made Continent in 1989. But this film would go on to become the first salvo in the “Glaciation Trilogy.” Haneke’s idea is that humanity is headed for a second-great ice age, but the threat this time isn’t physical, but moral and emotional. Each of the three films seeks to explore an aspect of human character that Haneke believes will set the stage for the coming spiritual apocalypse. Benny’s Video addresses the fetishization of violence and the rise of fascism. 71 Fragments looks at the isolation and loneliness of modern life. And kicking things off, we have The Seventh Continent which uses a perfectly adorable middle-class family to explore the stultifying effects of capitalism, emotional estrangement, and existential ennui.
Continent is a tight, simple story with a masterful sense of structure. Each of the film’s three “acts” begins with the wife, Anna, a successful optician, narrating a letter to her mother-in-law. After the narration, there are scenes of preparation for a party, and then, like clockwork, the next act begins. Seamlessly, we follow Anna, her engineer husband Georg, and their creepy (for real, this movie is one knifing away from being considered an evil child film) little daughter Eva for three years as they move from one mundane day to the next.
Of course, even the most boring of modern lives has its bits of tragedy and intrigue. Act one deals with Anna helping her distraught brother recover from their mother’s sudden death, and the party that anchors the first act is a cute dinner party thrown in his honor, welcoming him back to the world of the living after his stay in a sanitarium. To break the tension, Georg puts on music and they eat in near silence, then, eerily, quietly, Anna’s brother begins to weep. Small sobs become huge belly gasps and the family sits there stunned until Anna finally moves to comfort him and Georg eventually turns off the music.
While this family drama plays out, Eva has been having trouble at school because she has recently been pretending to be blind, a ruse her no-nonsense teacher calls bullshit on. Anna, who runs a dispensary and has to endure weird tales of her clients’ struggles with eyesight, is understandably furious that her daughter would pretend to have a disability, but seems to soften when she finds a newspaper on the child’s desk describing the triumphs of a blind little girl.
Act Two deals with Georg and the intrigues at what appears to be a power plant. Georg is clearly his boss’s favorite, and this endangers the old manager, an unpleasant man who takes a sick leave due to declining health. Anna and Georg prepare for a party at their house in honor of Georg’s boss, and as they make arrangements, they are caught in a traffic jam. They see a fatal car crash and later, as they wash their own car at an automated carwash, Anna slowly crumbles into tears. Georg, after a significant pause, comforts her.
Finally, the third act takes a surreal turn. As Anna’s narration drones on in the same meditative tone of voice, the viewers realize with horror that this final letter is a suicide note. With ritualistic calm, the family withdraws all their money, buys a ton of luxurious food and alcohol, barricades themselves in the house, and systematically destroys everything they own. As the exhaustion of days spent as silent, voluntary hostages in their own home wears on them, Anna and Georg poison their child and then themselves.
The film’s title comes from another device that serves to break up the acts--an eerie picture of a rocky coastline flanked by mountains, all threatened by a storm laden sky. This is supposed to be an advertisement for Australia, the eponymous “seventh continent” and the place Anna and Georg claim they are immigrating to when they quit their jobs and withdraw all their money. I’ve spent more time than anyone should be thinking about this mordant masterpiece, but I cannot truly parse Australia’s significance. Perhaps it symbolizes the most foreign place Haneke could conceive of, someplace wild, uninhabited and vaguely threatening (as the film goes on and the tone become more dire, the picture becomes stormier, darker, stranger). The ad makes its first appearance in the car wash that is later the setting for Anna’s breakdown, and both things--advertisement and automated car wash--become hollow symbols of modern life. Both reek of artificiality and both belong to a culture of all-encompassing commercialization.
This theme of the omnipresence of capitalism is constantly reinforced through Haneke’s camerawork. In contrast to the shots Bergman favored in Hour of the Wolf, hypnotically tight close-ups and dramatically shadowed faces, Haneke opts for alienation. The characters seem to exist in a void of products and often, we don’t even see the actors’ faces, only their hands, their feet, maybe an errant elbow as they shuttle around grocery stores, work machines, drive cars and spend money. When the family sequesters themselves to begin their slow march toward death, the focus does not become more intimate--the scenes of the family shredding every object in their house showcases the goods being destroyed more than the people wrecking the havoc. This only serves to underscore the coldness at the film’s heart. From the frigidity with which the family treat other to the callousness of the corporate world, as exemplified by Georg’s struggle for power against his rapidly aging boss, the people of Continent occupy a cold, cold world, one that is consistently unwarmed by human touch or affection.
After reading about all this Brechtian alienation, all this cold-hearted art house nihilism, you might be questioning the wisdom of including this in my celebration of crazed and crazy love. But after multiple viewings, the aspect of this film that always gets under my skin is the absolute, fearless complicity between Anna and Georg. While I’ve described their marriage as cold, there is nothing in the film to suggest a lack of actual love between them. Georg is hesitant to support Anna during her time of despair not because he does not love her or does not wish for her to feel better, but because he sincerely does not know how to connect to another person, just as Anna was similarly perplexed when called upon to comfort her grieving brother. If anything, Anna and Georg suffer because they are too like each other, distant, clinical, lost in a world that long gave up its need for humanity.
Their decision, to “immigrate” as they say, is reached without conversation, argument or discord. They work together as the perfect team, dividing up the chores that comprise their very theatrical suicide. A weird kind of hive mind seems to exist between them, and the slow-building dread that gradually ratchets up as the film’s despair builds and builds is due in part to their completely united front. These two desperate, desperately crazy people lead outwardly normal lives of work, school activities, and dinner parties, but inside, they share the same fast-spreading sickness, and like plague victims, they quarantine themselves from the rest of society to take care of their problems. Late in the film there is a breathless scene that shows a phone repairman dropping by the house. Anna and Georg look disoriented and confused, panicked that an emissary of the outside world could intrude on their insane solitude. Blocking the chaos of their ruined house from view, Georg persuades the repairman to leave and only after he has closed and locked the door, sealing the two of them off from the world, can they continue their deadly ritual.
It’s probably pretty clear that I love, love, love this movie. I love the cold-blooded aesthetics. I love the nihilistic ballsiness. I love the performances and the spare, haunting use of music. I love this movie.
But admittedly, it’s not something I can indulge in often. Like Hour of the Wolf, this film delves into the darkest parts of humanity and offers a very scary counter-narrative to the idea that love does indeed conquer all. Like the hapless couple in Hour, the closeness between Anna and Georg seems to make their depression breed like a virus. As their madness grows, they find they have to increasingly pull away from others, involve themselves more deeply with one another, if their plan is going to succeed. They are so trapped in poisoned group think, in blind devotion to each other, neither has the objectivity to say, “Maybe we need help,” or “Things are shit, yeah, but let’s not fucking kill ourselves.”
Haneke wanted to deconstruct every capitalist myth he could find--that wealth will spare us from suffering, that things will fill a void, that upward mobility is the best life insurance. And maybe, along with all these more expected lessons about the dangers of consumerism, he offers up another--love, the grand Westernized idea of belonging totally to another, is perhaps another socially constructed lie.
Pennie Sublime