Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon is the latest film from a ferociously gifted and no less provocative filmmaker at the very height of his considerable powers. Troubling, beautiful, unerringly calm yet intensely confrontational it is a film of such towering authority and icy detachment that it might go down as one of the most commanding by any director from the last decade. I have certainly seen nothing like it for intensity. Filmed in pin sharp monochrome, a feature that only accentuates the sense of aggressive objectivity, it explores themes that students of Haneke (it feels impossible to be a mere “fan” of the Austrian director as his films demand not simply passive enjoyment but deep exploration, to be repeatedly turned over, assimilated, absorbed in a search for meaning) will be familiar: guilt, violence, repression, defiance. And like not only his most widely released film Hidden (2004) but so many of his creations, it is also recognisably absent of any tidy resolution. And it is more remarkable for it.
Set in a German village in 1913-14, cautiously hinting at the roots and embryonic evils of both World Wars I and II, over the course of two and half hours Haneke builds an unbearable tension and foreboding through a series of mysterious, malicious acts that give birth to a terrible fear that infects everyone among the isolated community, from rural workers to baron landowners. As terror pervades the village like a disease, patriarchal cruelty comes to be the dominant, and default, characteristic. Violence, both physical and psychological, shrouds every aspect of village life as its inhabitants sink in to a mire, and unbroken cycle, of punishment and retribution.
That everything we see is narrated by the village schoolmaster (although seen from the children’s perspective) , recalled from an indeterminate distance after the events that we witness, should alert us to the idea of subjective memories, particularly given Haneke’s predilection for creating uncertainty and suspicion. Yet it is impossible not to see the seeds of the National Socialism that drove Europe to war some thirty-plus years later in the malicious actions of the children of the village. It is typical Haneke, inviting his audience to read deeper and deeper into his texts, simultaneously affirming and denying our sense of reality, provoking us, challenging us to create an allegory for what we are both seeing and hearing but providing no specific, and certainly no revealing, insights. It is cruel cinema in every sense of the word but, like his earlier films, perversely appealing.
The White Ribbon is film that demands to be seen by anyone with even a passing interest in cinema and the emotions it can provoke. It is unsettling in its crisp, dispassionate observations of a community driven to spasmodic acts of depravity; of the odious potential of puritanical bourgeois hierarchies to inflict pain and suffering; and of the possibilities of successive generations to seek revenge for the sins of their fathers, and sink even deeper into that cycle of ruthless violence and hatred. Hope and love do appear briefly at the peripheries of the film but the unrelenting sense of corrupted innocence dominates everything. It is a remarkable film from a remarkable director. Disturbing, mesmerising, wonderful.
