The sins of the fathers are visited on the childrenand vice versa?

Rating: 8/10 (6 October 2014)

Not sure I buy Haneke's coy suggestion that the misdeeds of the spooky kid vigilantes that drive the plot of this film, set in a small North German village in 1914, might have something to do "certain events that later took place in our country." Doesn't really matter... "The White Ribbon," filmed in silvery black and white, plays like an adaptation of a classic novel—right up till the copout pomo ending—and I found the doings of the pompous gentry (the Baron, the Overseer, the Doctor, the Pastor...) and their vindictive offspring quite suspenseful and involving, even though I knew better than to expect a tidy solution from the likes of him. If I were pitching the script, I'd say something like "Agatha Christie meets Thomas Hardy meets Edvard Munch"; there's an atmosphere of brooding Nordic fatalism hanging over this village of the verdammt, but no Miss Marple or council of the Fates to sort things out. If you know a little German, the formal, old-fashioned dialogue is pretty easy to follow, with the verbs thumping down at the end like so many shoes dropping. Reminded me of Fassbinder's "Effi Briest," classic 19th- century-style German storytelling refracted through a whacked-out visual sensibility. (I agree that the white-on-white subtitles were a bit of a drag, however...)