fear and hope

Rating: 10/10 (8 December 2009)

Michael Haneke's latest film is a very gloomy picture. This is in itself not remarkable, since his movies are never exactly fun to watch. But in Das weisse Band the outlook appears to be grimmer than ever. According to the director, its story offers an explanation of the horrors that the European continent has witnessed in the course of the twentieth century.
The plot revolves around some dramatic, mysterious, even cruel events that upset a seemingly peacefull small town in southern Germany. The year is 1913, the first World War is, as we are informed by the voice over, close at hand.
The film opens as the village doctor and his horse trip, at full speed, over a piece of string, tied across the road. The horse dies, the doctor is hospitalized. Is it a children's prank that was taken a bit too far or is it an attempted murder?
To Haneke such a fall is almost a metaphor to life. His characters are prone to 'tripping' over unforeseen complications. The villagers however regard such an accident as fate. Everyone but the baroness (who found a lover in Italy) and the schoolteacher (who declined a prosperous future in the sowing-business of his parents) seems to have a genuinely fatalistic outlook on life. At one point in the movie the schoolteacher walks in on one of his students who is playing a very hazardous balancing-game. The boy explains that he gave God the chance to smite him. The doctors' fall is only the first of many disturbing events. Sometimes the cause is obvious, sometimes the cause is lost in the inky black communal conscience. Or do the children know more...?
When the children are to inherit the future, then the apocalyptic scenario of two world wars is a fitting inheritance for this generation. Or so it seems in this film. I wonder if Haneke's outlook is not equally fatalistic as his morbid characters'.
Still, it's not all fatalism or cynicism in this picture. Quite unexpectedly hope shines through time and again. In a little boy's offering his pet bird to his father, whose parakeet has been slaughtered. In the offering of music to a distraught soul. Even in a father's love for his children in the midst of a violent upbringing.
Das weisse Band is a very balanced film. Which is remarkable, since it moves between extremes. It is also a beautiful production. Shot in high contrast black and white, which gives the impression of watching silent- movie-footage. And the characters are acted out with love and depth. It is a film well worth watching, and it will surely give you something to think about for a long time.