Cast: Christian Friedel, Bhurgart Klausner
Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Running time: 2 hrs 24 mins
Genre: Drama
CRITIQUE:
It is practically impossible to love a Michael Haneke film. His oeuvre is deeply entrenched in the dark vestiges of human moralities, with films that touch the ambiguous, the psychologically disturbing and the unnerving. In The Piano Teacher, he dissects a woman’s sexual repression and subsequent descent to pathos. In Funny Games, he played mind-games with his audience about the philosophies of cinematic violence. And in Hidden, he provokes our contemporary culture with attacks on privacy. Most of all, in one common strand, Haneke’s films are built to rouse our judgments and then finish off without payoffs. It’s like having sex without reaching a climax, really. So it’s relatively rational one barely enjoys a Haneke celluloid.
His latest work, crowned Palme D’or in Cannes, would seem to be a difficult chore to watch through for any average mainstream shlub. Filmed in a monochromatic black-and-white, clocking for almost three hours and involving a cast of virtual unknowns, anyone with an attention span of a bored spaniel will be harrumphing at the roll of subtitled scenes. There’s no question about its existence as an antithesis to mainstream spunk. For The White Ribbon is war film without a war, a whodunit without that final exposé of who-had-done-it, a mystery without any easy answers, a ghost story without ghosts, and just like the two inquiring policemen in the film, they’ll never know what is happening in the sleepy village for sure.
Haneke strips any colour away and tells this “mystery in a German countryside” circa pre-First World War in a stark monochrome, like a vintage, age-worn European postcard brought to vivid life. The story here presented here is almost unfathomable, as the narrative strand intercuts from one vignette to the next, roving tales from one household to the other in this almost nonexistent village. A local doctor meets a horseback riding accident from an unseen wire tied to trees, a farmer’s wife dies enigmatically in a ranch, a boy is tortured and hanged, and a barn is engulfed in flames. All these happen whilst the village children roam around in packs. The suspect could be anyone. The iron-willed Baron and his mischievous Baroness wife, the draconian Pastor, the vindictive farmer or the lovelorn midwife. It couldn’t possibly be the children. Or could it?
This is the epicentre, the throbbing core of Haneke’s evocation of Germany’s past. It is already speculated that The White Ribbon or Das Weisse Band is a glimpse into the root cause of Nazism, or the extreme socialist principles, in Germany. It could be that, or it could be also Haneke’s parable of evil innate in the face of humanity in every society. That once children are ostracized, severely punished and retained from being children, even innocence can become the greatest of monsters in the future. There is a scene that burns into the mind even long after viewing it: the ‘white ribbon’ represents virtue and purity, tied around the arms of those children who misbehave or tell lies, and in one chilling scene, a boy is chastised for his seeming dishonesty by his father. He cries, claiming not guilty, but a gut feeling tells us that this face of innocence is harbouring a sense of revolt and hatred.
Haneke also suggests here that rigorous ethical conducts and religion masks the rotten morality beneath the veneer and genteel of a tidy outer semblance. A doctor disowns a mistress in a ruthless rebuff, whilst molesting his daughter in his operating room; a pastor deprives his children of dinner from mere childish misbehaviour. All of these are shown, yet knowing that there are still so many things that the camera does not reveal to us, as it jumps from one engrossing situation to the next. Haneke is masterful in giving us this feeling of not knowing anything what’s happening in this tale, but given the context of what’s looming on the horizon historically, it’s makes this more profoundly disturbing.
VERDICT:
This may leave audiences cold and detached, but there’s no denying that Haneke’s chilling allegory is provocative, insightful and profoundly haunting. It will have you riveted from first frame to the last, with a brilliant Haneke open-ended finish that will have empty heads scratched and send those perceptive ones brooding with the film’s disconcerting message that children bear the sins of their fathers. A stunning work of a socially-conscious and important artist.
RATING: A+
