The Seventh Continent (1989)
Directed by Michael Haneke
Chronicles three years of a middle-class family seemingly caught up in their daily routines, troubled only by minor incidents. Behind their apparent calm and repetitive existence, however, they're planning something much more sinister.
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What critics compared The Seventh Continent to
When, in Michael Haneke’s “The Seventh Continent” (1989), a father led his family in the Davis-like destruction of their home, you knew that there could be only one conclusion.
Dogtooth is at its most sublimely absurd when the parents are interpreting phenomena like passing airplanes or Frank Sinatra's recording of "Come Fly with Me"; it's at its best when it hovers between the trauma of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò and the creepiness of Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent.
Haneke's adaptation of a novel by Elfriede Jelinek may be shot, edited and performed rather more conventionally than most of his work, but in many ways it's no less confrontational or transgressive than, say, The Seventh Continent or Funny Games.
As in Haneke's earlier "Benny's Video" and (less directly) "The Seventh Continent," the target here is not only contemporary materialism and self-satisfaction, but also modern media--symbolized by a mobile phone that refuses to function dependably, and brought directly into the narrative by a few surprising moments (and one that's downright astonishing) when a character manipulates the action (and us in the audience) as a self-aware part of the fiction.
Writer-director Michael Haneke (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) communicates this thesis very clearly, mostly through one of the two killers, Paul (who refers to himself and the other k iller as Paul and Peter, or Tom and Jerry, or Beavis and Butt-head).
Haneke's first feature, The Seventh Continent (1989), brilliantly chronicles the hideous fall of another affluent family, rendering the savage effects of modern techno-alienation through a frigid style befitting such masterpieces as Godard's Weekend, Bresson's L'Argent, and Haynes's Safe.
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The good folks at Kino Video sent me a package of the Austrian director’s pre-Caché features, from his first, The Seventh Continent, through his U.S. art-house breakthrough, The Piano Teacher.
Here is a roundup of Haneke's career thus far: In The Seventh Continent, a middle-class family smashes their material possessions, flushes wads of money down the toilet, then commits group suicide.