A haunting tale of premonition

Rating: 10/10 (26 December 2015)

Michael Haneke is one of those directors who deliver tough love. There's no pampering of viewers with too obvious plots, shallow characters or corny humor. "Das Weisse Band" is a great example of this. Set in a pre-WW1 German village, it's a story about a series of disturbing, seemingly inexplicable events that shake the pious protestant community to its core. Basically, what Haneke does here is a biopsy of the roots of fascism in the human character and its slow but steady community cultivation that may, or may not, explode at a certain point in the future. This is achieved with an immensely subtle approach: there's no mention of Nazis or fascism itself; the narrator of the story itself just says at the beginning that he will try to "explain some things that happened later" and we're left puzzled until it dawns on us what he actually referred to. In a way, the film is structured with symbols similar to those from Georg Grosz's art, with the main protagonists being referred to only by their function, instead of their name (Priest, Teacher, Baron etc.), which is aimed at showing that this could happen-and has happened- everywhere. The cinematography is remarkably done in b/w and the haunting motif of the white ribbons on the kids' arms seem like a dark premonition of the yellow stars from WW2. The end comes as puzzling as the rest, there's no solution, nor absolution. The world is slowly descending into darkness, and everyone pretends they don't see it. What's more, it seems that we're in a similar situation today, with barbed wires in place of white ribbons. And yet, we didn't learn anything from Haneke, or an another man who showed us the sheer size of unleashed evil, and whose name starts with the same letter. Hitler.