As I've mentioned a few times, I've got a bunch of foreign films on my DVR waiting to be watched, some of which I may not get around to watching before they expire. Then again, they're all distributed by Criterion, since that seems to be about all TCM runs when it comes to foreign films, so TCM will get around to those movies again. Anyhow, a few months back TCM Imports was a double feature of films directed by Michael Haneke, and I've now watched the first of the two, The Seventh Continent.
The movie is divided into three parts, each of which is roughly one day in the lives of a middle-class Austrian family in 1987, 1988, and 1989. The main family has father Georg, who works at what looks like a power plant; wife Anna, who works as an optometrist; and daughter Evi, who is a bit of a problem child as, in the 1987 sequence, Evi feigns blindness!
Georg's parents are only briefly seen, but in both the 1987 and 1988 parts of the movie, Anna is heard narrating letters to them that give some of the family's back story. Anna's mother died sometime in 1986 and left Anna and her brother Alexander an inheritance of a family business, but the death also left Alexander in an obviously depressive state of the sort that required hospitalization. All of the dealing with the will and such also had an effect on Anna, but a rather more subtle one. At work, Georg seems to be doing fairly well, as he's up for a promotion when his boss eventually retires.
The first segment in 1987 involves Anna inviting her brother over for dinner, although it doesn't go quite so well as Alexander's depression seems to return rather suddenly in the form of a crying jag. Anna is also ticked at Evi's lying to her teacher, and even responds by smacking the poor girl, something that's a portent of events later in the movie. Georg, for his part, has been dreaming about selling everything and moving to Australia (hence, the title of the movie); if they sell their share of the inheritance they'd have the seed money to make a move.
The second segment, in 1988, shows how Georg is moving up in his job, but going into further detail about the family's life will begin to risk giving away the ending of the film. And that's part of why I found The Seventh Continent a difficult film to write a full-length post on. Not that it's a bad movie, by any stretch of the imagination. It's more that it's hard to describe without giving too much away, and more than a lot of other films you don't want to give a lot away.
Haneke's filmmaking style here is slightly unorthodox, consisting of short vignettes separated by fades to black that are longer than in most movies that transition between scenes (and I don't mean just the end of the 1987 and 1988 parts here). The movie also has long scenes without much in the way of dialog, which is a good thing for those of you who don't care much for reading subtitles. One quibble I had, however, was a plot hole of how it seemed as though Georg hadn't seen his parents in ages even though they presumably live someplace in Austria and it's not as if it would be overly difficult for them to visit each other -- Austria isn't that big a country. But that's a minor nitpick.
The Seventh Continent is an interesting movie, although it's another one I'm not certain is going to be for everyone.
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