Michael Heneke’s ‘The Seventh Continent’

La Strada, La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini), The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi), Taste Of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami), Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais), Good Morning and Early Spring (Yasujiro Ozu),Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese), Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin), The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot ), Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa), Underground (Emir Kusturica), Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón), A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson), are some of the few films that I saw and could relate to an existential theme. But of late after watching Michael Heneke’s The Seventh Continent, I understood what Albert Camus meant in his “An Absurd Reasoning.” I quote and unquote Camus

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest -- whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories -- comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.”


In Michael Heneke’s ’The Seventh Continent’, A tedious middle-class family is exposed in a chain of condensed scenes, going about their daily chores over a number of years. The husband is an engineer, the wife an optician who co-owns the business with her brother. They have a bright and passive little girl. For the first half-hour or so, Haneke doesn't show anyone's faces: just close-ups on hands, feet, necks, waists as they get up, brush their teeth, make breakfast, and go about the daily grind. By this time you start to feel bored. As an audience you might even start to abuse. You also start to wonder how tedious life can be. You then realize you cannot escape from the shackles of routine and consumption.

After about 30 minutes of this study of human and their modern meaningless culture, we get a hold of a comprehensible view of their faces, with some restrained suggestions that all is not well.

Finally, it becomes clear that the family is coming to a startling conclusion about the uselessness, triviality, worthlessness, insignificance and futility of their lives, which is finally dissected in the most extravagant approach.

After the movie you step out and see people gliding through life in sealed glass boxes, unable to really connect to anything besides their materialistic possessions.

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