“Did you ever wonder who tortured
Kali and Sigi? Who tied the wire to trip the doctor? Who set fire to the barn?”
An epidemic of mysterious and
increasingly brutal crimes descends on a small German Protestant farm village in
Michael Haneke’s nuanced fable about whether repressive religion and draconian
child rearing practices can lay the groundwork for unthinkable evil.
The time is 1913, exactly fifteen
months before the start of what my father’s generation had hoped would be the
war to end all wars. Most of the villagers live under the semi-feudal rule of
the baron (Ulrich Tukur) or the pastor (Burghart Klaussner). Tilling the
baron’s fields or tending to his offspring is about the only game in town while
the pastor is gatekeeper to the world to come.
For those like me who have greeted
earlier entries in Haneke’s special cinema of cruelty – The Piano Teacher,
Hidden, Funny Games – as a kind of forced full submersion baptism into a
movie church of highly suspect values, The White Ribbon just may unlock
the code to its creator’s punishing artistic theology.
In a chilling scene mid-way through
the film the pastor hectors his shamefaced adolescent son about the sin of
masturbation, claiming that playing with himself had literally been the death
of another boy. “The boy had learned from somebody, who had harmed the finest
nerves of his body, in the area where God’s will has erected sacred barriers.
The boy imitated this action. He couldn’t stop doing it, so that at the end he
destroyed all the nerves in his body, so much that he died of it.”
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The white ribbon of the title is
the special badge of shame – read, possibly a scarlet letter – that the pastor
forces his children to wear until they can show by their deeds that they are
once again on the road to innocence and untrammeled moral purity. Gradually the
director shows us the growing number of unsolved crimes – including the torture
beating of the baron’s son and an even more unspeakable act of torture on a
small disabled boy – may be acts of almost guerrilla like resistance by some of
the children, acts of terror initiated possibly by his own beloved white ribbon
wearing darlings.
Unlike like previous Haneke films, The
White Ribbon has an unalloyed sweet side in the form of an old fashioned
courtship between the village school teacher (Christian Friedel) and a young
woman employed as a nanny for the baron’s kids.
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While Haneke only hints at the
dastardly forces at work in the village, the distinctly non-sentimental keyhole
to the past that he paints is an aesthetic experience absent from his earlier
films. In some ways viewing parts of The White Ribbon – including brutal
illicit sex scenes, corpses, human and animal – some scenes that are simply
bizarrely beautiful for almost unfathomable reasons: like the sight of a young
boy beheading a field of cabbages as if he was presiding over a mass execution
– provides the best insight we may ever get into the heart of a filmmaker who
confessed once to having been born into a childhood so wonderful that it might
as well have been a Fellini movie and who once admitted that his own first
experience at the movies ended in tears: when his five-year-old self fled a
showing of Lawrence Olivier’s Hamlet.