The White Ribbon

Win­ning the Palme d’Or at Cannes is a decid­ed­ly mixed bless­ing. For all the ones that go on to win oth­er major awards and pierce the inter­na­tion­al main­stream – Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, Jane Campion’s The Piano – there are those that remain in art­house pur­ga­to­ry, like the Dar­d­enne broth­ers’ The Child or Nan­ni Moretti’s The Son’s Room.

The anti-reli­gious sen­ti­ment of Michael Haneke’s lat­est film, which won the award ear­li­er this year, may seal its fate in the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry. Let us hope not, for The White Rib­bon is the Aus­tri­an director’s most ambi­tious and most acces­si­ble film to date.

Haneke’s cru­el streak, expressed so vio­lent­ly in both the orig­i­nal and his Hol­ly­wood remake of Fun­ny Games, is tem­pered here in favour of a claus­tro­pho­bic atmos­phere of oppres­sion. The year is 1913. In a rur­al Ger­man vil­lage still over­seen by a feu­dal land­lord, the small Protes­tant com­mu­ni­ty is rocked by a series of unex­plained events each more vio­lent than the last. As the towns­peo­ple slow­ly turn in on them­selves, a young school­teacher begins to sus­pect that his pupils may not be as inno­cent as they seem.

If you’ve ever seen a Haneke film, you’ll know bet­ter than to expect a sat­is­fy­ing res­o­lu­tion to the var­i­ous mys­ter­ies he sets up, but this film comes clos­er to it than any of his oth­ers. In the first lines of the film, the nar­ra­tor solemn­ly intones that the events we are about to see ​“might clar­i­fy some things that hap­pened in this country.”

On a sim­plis­tic lev­el we are see­ing the seeds of Nazism being sewn, but that dimin­ish­es the scope of Haneke’s inten­tions. This film is about how all com­mu­ni­ties ruled by reli­gious repres­sion are doomed to self-destruct. The deeply con­ser­v­a­tive pas­tor (played with ter­ri­fy­ing sever­i­ty by Burghart Klauss­ner) is the clos­est this film has to a vil­lain; a man whose dis­ci­pli­nar­i­an zeal ends up cor­rupt­ing more than it inspires.

Haneke has said that The White Rib­bon is a film about the ​‘roots of evil’, and it is appro­pri­ate that it most resem­bles a hor­ror film. The painter­ly black and white cin­e­matog­ra­phy and the per­va­sive feel­ing of men­ace makes this a kind of Vil­lage of the Damned for the cere­bral set.

Which is not to say it’s an entire­ly dark film. There are moments of sweet­ness, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the schoolteacher’s shy, bum­bling courtship of the landlord’s nan­ny, that show Haneke is not sim­ply a gloom mer­chant. But that streak of cru­el­ty is not com­plete­ly absent; a sim­ple scene show­ing the doc­tor (Rain­er Bock) jilt­ing his mis­tress (Susanne Lothar) is a mas­ter­class in explic­it abuse all the more shock­ing for being deliv­ered with emo­tion-free directness.

Styl­is­ti­cal­ly and the­mat­i­cal­ly, The White Rib­bon shows a direc­tor in full con­trol of his form. From the metic­u­lous com­po­si­tion of his frames to the sub­tle sequenc­ing of his scenes, Haneke is now at the height of his pow­ers. This is a com­plete work of cin­e­ma, at once engag­ing and ingenious.