Like Caché (2005), Haneke’s film about a sophisticated Parisian couple being tormented by mysterious surveillance videotapes of their house, The White Ribbon takes the ostensible form of a mystery, albeit one that Haneke has no real intention of ever solving. A perpetually unconventional filmmaker who nevertheless displays supreme command of the conventions of his medium, Haneke does not trade in simple pleasures or easy answers (he once said that it is harder for audiences to watch his films than it is for him to make them). As a result, he has often been dismissed as cold and distant and even moralistic and preachy, but I find his work utterly fascinating; far from clockwork oranges, his films are dense, emotionally charged, multilayered explorations of the darkest recesses of the human condition. He alternately evokes such art film maestros as Bergman, Antonioni, and Kubrick--not just their masterly formal style, but their fierce, guiding intelligence. Watching a Haneke film, it is impossible not to feel his presence as author, even as his stories engross and absorb us.

The White Ribbon is the first of Haneke’s films to use a narrator, which gives the film a particularly literary feel (many people have asked him what book he adapted). The narrator (Ernst Jacobi) is looking back from the distance of many decades, when he was a baby-faced 31-year-old schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) in a small German village, thus placing him at the center of events even though he is rarely more than a bystander and witness. Early on he admits that he is not a reliable narrator and that parts of the story may be incorrect, which fits directly with Haneke’s tendency to provide untrustworthly cinematic narratives (one is immediately reminded of Funny Games, when a character inexplicably is allowed to rewind a scene and play it again to his favor).

The crux of the story is that the village is being plagued by a series of strange, unexplained “accidents,” starting with the town doctor (Rainer Bock) breaking his collar bone when his horse is tripped by a wire strung across his garden. The village is lorded over economically by the Baron (Ulrich Tukur), whose farm employs virtually all of the villagers, and spiritually by the pastor (Burghart Klaussner), a strict, humorless man of little sensitivity whom we first meet berating his children for coming home late and sending them to bed without food. The parental figures in the film are products of an era of stern morality and unquestioned patriarchal authority, which finds its voice in various tenors that range from the explicitly violent (the pastor’s whipping his children), to the subtly manipulative (the father of the school teacher’s object of affection dictating their relationship), to the casually cruel (the doctor’s brutal emotional treatment of his lover), which has perhaps resulted in a generation of children who have absorbed and internalized this violence and are secretly returning it (the film’s German subtitle is “A German Children’s Story”). The fact that we never know for sure if the village children are up to no good makes the film all the more unsettling; Haneke understands the powerfully uncanny effect children can have, especially when moving in groups that immediately call to mind the lineage of terrible children in horror movies like Village of the Damned (1960).

And, in many ways, The White Ribbon could be described as a horror movie, with its slow-burn sense of dread and constant threat of violence; the only thing that differentiates it from a traditional horror film is its refusal to isolate and identify the monster. Rather, Haneke does something much more frightening in suggesting that monsters are everywhere, and thus there is no escaping them, much less fighting and defeating them. The violence inflicted throughout the film carries a heady charge, and the fact that almost all it takes place off-screen makes it no less unnerving; like Funny Games, it is the idea of the violence, not its explicit depiction, that gives the film its chill and sets us on edge. More so than any other contemporary filmmaker, Haneke knows how violence seeps into every recess of our lives, and he evokes it not to titillate, but to engage and challenge.

Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick

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