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| Most helpful customer reviews 4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Excellent film. Extremely unorthodox. Be warned, this film doesn’t really follow a standard narrative (it seems like most of what happens happens off-screen).
This is a film about a family that literally implodes, however there are no big verbal exchanges or explosions, no big speeches about “the meaning of it all”. The director tells the story primarily with images and people placed in the frame as secondary characters to inanimate objects.
Essentially, a story about a family (mother, father, daughter) that are emotionally devastated by the 20th century and the environment of the technology age.
Someone else was correct in describing this film as similar to Todd Haynes “Safe”. Both films are excellent, although Safe is more creepy-crawly ambiguous, The Seventh Continent is more devastating, darker – the kind of film that rattles your teeth days after when thinking about it.
there are scenes in this film that literally make you want to jump out of your skin: the sight of a pair of hands tearing up money and flushing it down the toilet (we never see the person’s face). The scene goes on and on and you keep thinking “when is the director going to cut away from this???” but he keeps showing it. And then you realize there is something awesomely disturbing about what you are seeing: its so taboo in this day and age to see money being systematically, ritualistically destroyed. And to see it go on and on provokes a real response.
There are many moments like this. 4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. 3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. This is Haneke’s first feature film and thus his most amateur. `Der Siebente Kontinent’ is a film that, like all of Haneke’s work, will haunt you. Using his cautious approach to weave a tale of eventual brutish barbarianism, Haneke creates a cold and isolated world that the audience feels almost instantly repulsed by. We are guarded as we sit down to soak in all that Haneke presents, and as we indulge our senses we see that there is much within this world to be afraid of. Being the first film in Haneke’s `Glaciation Trilogy’, `Der Siebente Kontinent’ definitely creates an air of emotional apathy. The film is a true account of a young suburban family who find that they have become emotionally void thanks to their thankless existence. They go through their routines with a sterile quality that leaves them rather unfulfilled. With nothing to differentiate them from anyone else (thus Haneke’s decision to film them solely from the neck down for the first few minutes of the film), they have become another statistic; nothing more, nothing less. Watching this family go through their daily routine can become predictable and boring, but that is the entire intent of the film. Haneke films this in a way that brings the audience right into their home and into their life and gives them exactly what is needed to place them in the right mind frame. If their lives were interesting then the ending wouldn’t make much sense. The films last 30-minutes may come as a major shock, and that is indeed the purpose. If you can make it through without feeling completely torn up inside then I think you may possess a callous soul (although I am the one who said he felt NOTHING while watching `Benny’s Video’). The vision that Haneke lays out for us is repulsive to the mind because it contradicts everything we want to accept. As we watch this family slowly crumble under their own mental disease (if you can label it that) we see fragments of our own lives. The mundane, forgettable, repeated procedure that establishes our days, weeks, months and years slowly begins to eat away at our desire to continue. What is all the more shocking is that this family shows absolutely no signs of internal torment. They seem happy and content. Like you and me. In then end, `Der Siebente Kontinent’ is a striking film that suffers at times from its own intellect. Like I said, this is Haneke’s most amateurish film, and so there are many segments that seem to become distracted by Haneke’s own vision. Over time Haneke found ways to perfect his style, showing great balance in his substance/visual department. Because `Der Siebente Kontinent’ is very much `wash, rinse, repeat’ it can get a tad over-long, which is the point but also a deterrent. It’s hard to critique something that seems almost necessary, but truth be told it can and does drag on in scenes (which is something of a feat for a film clocking in under 2-hours). I also found the ending (especially the use of the television) to be a tad overdone and rather `preachy’, which is not a quality I often relate to Haneke’s work. For something who relishes ambiguities, this film felt almost too `complete’ for me. I will never critique Haneke’s decisions to show the grit of the violence he creates, because that is the soul of his films. This films particular route in that department made me slightly nauseous and sunk me into a deep depression that his films don’t often do. Yes, he creates harsh themes and does deliver considerable `downer’ films, but I’ve never felt immovable after witnessing a feature film from him, until this one. The acting is spotty (Birgit Doll and Dieter Berner are pretty great, but Leni Tanzer falls apart in the end and Udo Samel is just plain bad) but overall it comes together just fine. In the end I strongly recommend you at least witness this film (and every other film by the genius that is Michael Haneke). There are few directors out there that can convey a theme so thoroughly, creating something almost organic out of something so `evil’. |
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