Once upon a time in pre-Nazi Germany...

Rating: 10/10 (4 July 2010)

The White Ribbon is an intriguingly strange piece of film: a deliberately elusive thriller, 150 minutes long, in black and white, set in Germany just before World War I. It's also the long awaited return to his mother tongue for Austrian provocateur Michael Haneke, after a decade filming in French and, in the case of his shot-for-shot remake of his own Funny Games, English. Additionally, and most importantly, it might be his most important film to date.
The story takes place in an unnamed rural village, where a strong Lutheran mindset rules. Over a period of a year, strange events occur which cause harm to some of the more respected inhabitants, like the doctor, the priest and, in a potentially political act, the local nobility. But who is to blame? Somehow, the children seem to be playing a significant role in this, and the priest comes up with a severe punishment: his offspring will have to wear a white ribbon, symbolizing their lost innocence, until they are trustworthy again...
Like all of Haneke's previous movies, The White Ribbon is, at first sight, a very frustrating picture: static shots, and overall "coldness" (despite a surprisingly spot-on comedic segment) and, most "annoyingly", a whodunit story with no solution. But that, of course, was to be expected: Haneke, an academic as well as a filmmaker, is not interested in easy answers, a fact that is most evident in his decision to deal with his trademark theme - the effects of violence on society - without depicting most of the acts on-screen (there are no sudden gushes of blood like in Funny Games or Hidden). Despite its straightforward storytelling, this Palme d'Or-winner could seem to be the director's most uncommercial feature, devoid as it is of a real "solution" and "big" names in the cast (although Haneke aficionados might recognize Susanne Lothar, the female star of the first Funny Games).
And yet it is a masterwork, because in his apparent refusal to spoon-feed the audience Haneke still provides a riveting - and frightening - study of human behavior, specifically man's capacity for evil. Beneath the sublime use of black and white and the period reconstruction, which give the picture a neatly anonymous, timeless feel (despite a couple of time-specific remarks), lies a very precise point of view on a very definite moment in history: the narrator (who, in pure mystery tale tradition, isn't very reliable) says the bizarre events in the village might shed some light on subsequent happenings, and Haneke seems to suggest the punished children of 1913 will have a chance to retaliate against other "wrongdoers" some twenty years later. It's merely an implication, with no closing captions to openly state the director's point, but it remains very unsettling.
Proving that you don't need blood and other gimmicks to make a statement about violence, The White Ribbon is a superb essay on the human condition: elusive, yet poignant and right on the mark. Extraordinary.