The Seventh Continent (1989)--3/5

"The Seventh Continent" has no intention of explaining itself. In building tension, director Michael Haneke gives us the life of a middle-class Austrian family for two days, one in 1987 and one in 1988. Haneke is nothing if not thorough with his concept; he conveys boredom and resignation in a family is by filming boring scenes of resigned characters.

It's more than just this, though. "The Seventh Continent" is ascetically planned and is storyboarded as rigorously as a Coen Bros. film. For nearly ten minutes, the family is rarely seen in their scenes. A moving hand or a face distorted through glass, for example, are the only evidence of life. It's the world's dourest Shedd's Spread Country Crock commercial.

Upon closer examination, every scene hides an unsettling joke beneath the domesticity. It could be something as little as the mother's extra spoonful of sugar in her daughter's cereal or as forboding as the violent slaps of a car wash's brush.

The climax of "The Seventh Continent" is absolutely stacked with memorable images. From the beginning of his career, Haneke, director of the audience-baiting "Funny Games," set out to provoke a response. Here, a two- to three-minute shot finds the family ripping in half tens of thousands of schillings and flushing them down the toilet. This and the other alien acts of destruction--systematically ripping up books and shirts, sledgehammering furniture and mirrors--end up being more shocking than the logical endpoint. Haneke has an inkling of his audience's potential thoughtcrimes and is happy to meet it more than halfway.