Disquieting apprehension lurks in Cannes prize winner

Masterful film tackles the birth of fascism

By Mildred Pierce

MUN Cinema Series

The White Ribbon (or, as the original German title reads, Das weisse Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte) comes to us this week from the director hailed by New York Times film critic A.O. Scott as, “One of the most exquisitely sadistic European filmmakers working today.”

Michael Haneke’s name is synonymous with psychological thrillers. He is the darling of the Cannes Film Festival, having won top honours for his 2005 post-9/11 masterpiece, Caché, a true Hitchcockian study of voyeurism, guilt, and paranoia. An intellectual magician, Haneke makes unsettling, challenging, and almost perversely entertaining films. We watch irresistibly, even though we are often the very subjects of his vivid social dissections.

The White Ribbon is Haneke’s latest and most historically vivid drama. It won the 2009 Palm d'Or at Cannes and is nominated this year for two Oscars for Best Cinematography and Best Foreign Film. It’s set in the days before WWI, in the Germany that would evolve into the monster of WWII. Who else has even remotely dared to take on this subject – that is, the scrutiny of the very people who would grow up to become the SS Officers and Nazi perpetrators of the Final Solution?

The Austrian-born Haneke is probably exploring the roots of his own fascination with psychological truth and horror, but certainly as a man raised in the 20th century, he’s exploring the very culture that precipitated such catastrophic social deviation, a culture he must know all too well.

The village Haneke turns his lens on is teeming with blond children and their conventional rural parents. These are doctors, lawyers, priests, schoolteachers – all the civilizing professions or occupations. Of course, men dominate that world, this being a time long before feminism. This is the way it was, and all looks ordinary, normal, and acceptable for its time.

But – and here’s where Haneke’s agenda insinuates itself into the veneer of ordinariness – all is not what it seems. Things – bad and violent things – start happening to people, but do they add up? Who is doing them? Why are the children sometimes the victims, or sometimes the suspicious perps themselves? In a way these are the questions in all of Haneke’s films. His urge is to make us, the audience, take moral and artistic responsibility and work towards supplying the answers. His audiences aren’t passive viewers, they’re accomplices.

The townspeople are certainly preoccupied with these questions, and with trying to find the facts of guilt, locate the blame, and punish the evil doers. But when they have trouble coming up with a perfect puzzle their suspicion deepens, their frustration intensifies, and they move closer to, not further from, a compulsion to order the world around them. One might be tempted to see that the film is a metaphor for fascism, what it is and how it breeds, but Haneke is not drawing so simplistic a parable, even if it is one of several readings of the story. Are these people just like us?

The White Ribbon is not merely a good film. It is an astonishing one. Note that Haneke shot the film in colour and then drained the colours right out of it. The result is a black and white canvas of ghost-like dimensions. See this film and book some time with your friends for the postpartum discussion. You will simply have to do it.

The White Ribbon plays Thursday, March 11, at Empire Theatres Studio 12 in the Avalon Mall. Tickets are $9 for students and seniors, $10 regular admission. Tickets go on sale at 6:00 pm, show time is 7:00 pm.

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