Das weiße Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte

Rating: 8/10 (4 February 2016)

In The White Ribbon, Haneke's mastery of building a quiet, unassuming dread is evident. It starts almost cartoonish, as an elderly school teacher recounts the events of the fabled village that have faded into legend and obscurity. He narrates via voice-over as the doctor's horse is suddenly tripped and he is flung from its seat. Who could have put it there? Little things begin happening that plunge us deeper and deeper into the mystery. Birds are found impaled with scissors. Children are found strung up and beaten. A disabled boy has his eyes gouged out. The villagers look at each other, and then avert their eyes because it could be any of them. In the midst of the crowd is the school teacher, who attempts to get to the bottom of the incidents while also wooing the young Eva.
It is not entirely a whodunit. Haneke prefers not to give straight answers, and the voice-over admits that these events are not as crystal clear as he once experienced them. Perhaps he is the film's straightest character, and this slightly smoothens its edge. In one instance, in the period of their one year engagement, he plans a lake-side picnic for Eva and him, but within the context of the village's violence incidents, she does not feel safe about being all alone with him. His response to this establishes the moral pillar of the film from where everything else is judged, and he is the one to make the final accusation. This subplot does not entirely fit within the rest of the events; their quiet, giggling conversations and simple romance is so removed from the rest of the simmering tension. Haneke, I think, seeks to invite viewers to align themselves with this bespectacled every-man, and then harshly shakes his head at this decision.
But even without the connotations of the rise of fascism and terrorism as Haneke has been so outspoken on (see how the narrator resolves to dig for the roots of national socialism, not fascism, and how he is suggested to have survived World War 2 - and then link the ages of the children to the date), it is a tremendously disturbing film, yet plausible. Haneke at first distances us from these events via these still long shots that do not outright display the atrocities that are being committed, but rather hint at them, as the muffled sounds of a beating emerge from behind a closed door. And then it becomes more evident, but revealed with great terror. Kurti peers behind a closed door to see his father and sister against each other, and subtly she slides down her dress while spinning a alternate explanation. When the steward's little boy presents a stolen bird to compensate for the one impaled, he is beaten senseless for being too young to understand the implications of his crime. The last shot gradually cuts away to a distance until the village is framed by the black bars of the gate, but Haneke does not ever leave these confines. He suggests that in such a closed environment it becomes so easy to stir up these hypocrisies and cycles of repression until we get...something beyond morally compromising.
Haneke does attempt to draw comparisons between the terror that is political versus that of a religious nature. There are murmurs of a mother's death in the sawmills, and how the baron is dismissive of this, and how the villagers retaliate namelessly. And then there is the hypocrisy of the pastor, who preaches an absolute love and behind closed doors, practices an absolute discipline of faith that is theorised to be the root cause of these incidents. But it is also suggested that they share the same root problem, a human tendency to mutate into absolutism and authoritarianism without any opposition. How else will children learn if not from their parental figures? In this little village, there is no other answer.