Michael Haneke is a master of unease. He does not want to let audiences sit back with a sense of satisfaction or assurance that they know exactly what is going on. In The White Ribbon he keeps you on the edge of your seat, but no murderous psychopath jumps out with a hatchet. Indeed, this is a horror film with no shocks, just an overwhelming sense that evil is afoot in the land.
The White Ribbon is getting a relatively quiet release in Taiwan compared to the greater fanfare surrounding Haneke’s English-language remake of Funny Games, which came out in 2007. This is partly because The White Ribbon will be screening in German, and also because of the absence of any recognizable Hollywood names. Funny Games was a heavy-handed polemic about our fascination with horror masquerading as a atmospheric thriller, and while the long-drawn-out torture and death of the main characters played by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth was unnerving, it was also relatively straightforward — bad people do ghastly things to, if not good, then at least normal people, and because it is a Michael Haneke film, they get away with it.
Nothing about The White Ribbon is straightforward, and it has aspirations that extend far beyond the rather self-referential cinematic concerns of Funny Games. Here we see Haneke taking on the big issues, looking in an oblique way at a German society that was about to embark on two horrendous world wars, and touching on the very nature of evil.
The film opens with the narrator telling us that he hopes to clarify events surrounding a number of strange incidents that happened in a small north German town just before the outbreak of World War I. The story he tells skillfully avoids clarifying anything at all, as every hint at what might actually be happening opens up an abyss of new questions.
A doctor is unhorsed by a wire strung across his path, the young son of the local lord is strung up and beaten and a mentally retarded child is savagely tortured, crops are willfully destroyed, a farm worker is killed in unexplained circumstances. These seemingly random incidents appear to have a common source, and while the culprits are indirectly identified at the end, Haneke suggests that everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, is to blame.
There are more than 30 named characters in the film, a huge ensemble cast who uniformly turn in fine performances. The intricacies of the plot are too complex and too open-ended to bear recounting here, but suffice to say that attempts to understand these bizarre incidents reveal a society that is ready to tear itself apart through a mixture of envy, greed, religious hypocrisy, malice and fear.
The mood of the film bears comparison with the religious-based horror of The Omen, and of science fiction horror such as Village of the Damned, but we soon realize that Haneke has no need for either Beelzebub or aliens to explain evil. In The White Ribbon evil lurks in the hearts of all.
The constraints of a deeply conservative society push characters into acts of physical violence and mental cruelty. What applies between the adults can be seen to have a heightened effect on the children, whose viciousness is rarely seen, but is constantly implied from the thin facade of innocence they put on. We see the psyche of the children being molded by the hypocrisy of their parents, and a twisted moral code in which a white ribbon, a symbol of innocence and purity, becomes a badge of shame for errant children. As with Haneke’s other films, most of the violence occurs off screen, but more often than not, this just makes it all the more horrendous.
With its wide concerns, its formal rigor, the sumptuousness of the black-and-white cinematography, and the sense of horror that it evokes from small actions of willful children and narrow-minded adults, The White Ribbon is one of the best films to open here this year.
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