Description

A village in Protestant northern Germany. 1913-1914. On the eve of World War I. The story of the children and teenagers of a choir run by the village schoolteacher, and their families: the baron, the steward, the pastor, the doctor, the midwife, the tenant farmers. Strange accidents occur and gradually take on the character of a punishment ritual. Who is behind it all? Like an ice-cold shower, Michael Haneke’s solemn and sobering films are more often good for the soul than a guaranteed pleasure. While not as confrontational as his previous film Funny Games, Haneke’s The White Ribbon–an account of sinister events in a rural German village in 1913–offers no compromises to the audience, but creates an unsolvable, unsettling riddle meant as a remedy to the disposable violence of conventional cinema. The morality of the village is safeguarded by three powerful disciplinarians: a doctor, a pastor and a baron, each privately abusive in different ways. Their order is threatened by a series of local incidents ranging from apparent accidents to acts of callous sabotage and vicious cruelty. The village’s creepy-looking children are somehow involved; in 20 years, the narrator reflects, the same kids will participate in the rise of Nazi Germany, and a link is implied between the rise of fascism and a generation’s moral hypocrisy and authoritarianism. But nothing is confirmed and no-one is accused. Neither is the audience off the hook: we’re complicit in the generalized evil at the heart of The White Ribbon for expecting the kind of palatable violence that’s carried out by unambiguous villains. Haneke gives us no such consolation. To borrow Al Pacino’s great lines from Scarface: we’re not allowed to point our fingers and say ‘that’s the bad guy’, however much we need to. –Leo Batchelor