Reap What You Sow.

Rating: 7/10 (28 January 2012)

It's an ordinary village in northern Germany in the year preceding the outbreak of World War I -- or so it seems -- until strange things begin happening. They're not supernatural in any way. A doctor's horse in deliberately tripped, severely injuring the rider. A woman falls through a rotting floor and is killed. A retarded child is tied to a tree and thoroughly beaten. People seem to be hiding things. People disappear.
But, unnerving as these events are, they seem to fit the frame of values in the village. We usually think of "the doctor" as the sensible person. "The Reverend", as a stock figure, is almost always for humanitarianism and forgiveness.
In this film, like everyone else, the "good" figures are possessed by destructive habits. The Pastor is taciturn and humorless and beats hell out of his many children for the slightest infraction, like being late for dinner. He forces one of his boys to admit to masturbation and chastises him. The doctor, victim of that horse fall, seems to be equally pitiless. He shows no sympathy, is schtupping the Midwife who is caring for his children, may have murdered his own wife, and is playing sex games with his own daughter.
There are two people -- neither of them a barrel of laughs -- who are less than repulsive. The Baron and his wife live in the Big House and hire the villagers are harvest time. The Baron is overbearing, but the wife, although not allowed to say much, wants to get out of the village because of the "malice" that is all around it. And the school teacher is a nice guy who is in love with the young Nanny in the Baron's employ. He comes to suspect the brutality is the result of a secret society among the children of the village, led by the Preacher's kids.
Before his hypothesis can be developed, before anything is resolved, war breaks out. Everyone left in the village crowds into the church. No one says anything. Fade to black. The End.
I don't know exactly what to make of it. It's a long, slow, black-and-white movie about a village gone sour. I've been trying to figure out how the war fits into it but I can't do it. The war seems adventitious. But it must be somehow connected to the transgressive events of the village otherwise why is it lurking there in the background? Maybe rotten people with bad habits cause war in some stochastic way? That doesn't work, because not only do the villagers have no politics or even any local allegiance, but Germany was sucked into the First World War just like all the other nations, as a result of a clumsy and sentimental arrangement of treaties and ethnic pride. Was the war a way of clearing up these bad habits, of getting rid of those strict rules and harsh punishments? Like hell. It led to a twenty-year truce, after which things got far worse than they had been.
It's a movie that gives us no one to root for -- except the teacher, an earnest and sober Schlub, who is narrating the tale in his old age. It's episodic too and sometimes a little hard to follow, never mind piecing it all together. But I was caught up in it after the first exhibition of pitiless punishment. I'm tempted to say it didn't turn out the way I expected, but it would be more accurate to say that I don't know HOW it turned out.