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.
Behind a car repair business on a nondescript Thai street are the cherished pets of a rising TikTok animal influencer: two lions and a 200-kilogram lion-tiger hybrid called “Big George.” Lion ownership is legal in Thailand, and Tharnuwarht Plengkemratch is an enthusiastic advocate, posting updates on his feline companions to nearly three million followers. “They’re playful and affectionate, just like dogs or cats,” he said from inside their cage complex at his home in the northern city of Chiang Mai. Thailand’s captive lion population has exploded in recent years, with nearly 500 registered in zoos, breeding farms, petting cafes and homes. Experts warn the
No one saw it coming. Everyone — including the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) — expected at least some of the recall campaigns against 24 of its lawmakers and Hsinchu Mayor Ann Kao (高虹安) to succeed. Underground gamblers reportedly expected between five and eight lawmakers to lose their jobs. All of this analysis made sense, but contained a fatal flaw. The record of the recall campaigns, the collapse of the KMT-led recalls, and polling data all pointed to enthusiastic high turnout in support of the recall campaigns, and that those against the recalls were unenthusiastic and far less likely to vote. That
The unexpected collapse of the recall campaigns is being viewed through many lenses, most of them skewed and self-absorbed. The international media unsurprisingly focuses on what they perceive as the message that Taiwanese voters were sending in the failure of the mass recall, especially to China, the US and to friendly Western nations. This made some sense prior to early last month. One of the main arguments used by recall campaigners for recalling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers was that they were too pro-China, and by extension not to be trusted with defending the nation. Also by extension, that argument could be
Aug. 4 to Aug. 10 When Coca-Cola finally pushed its way into Taiwan’s market in 1968, it allegedly vowed to wipe out its major domestic rival Hey Song within five years. But Hey Song, which began as a manual operation in a family cow shed in 1925, had proven its resilience, surviving numerous setbacks — including the loss of autonomy and nearly all its assets due to the Japanese colonial government’s wartime economic policy. By the 1960s, Hey Song had risen to the top of Taiwan’s beverage industry. This success was driven not only by president Chang Wen-chi’s
RSS