The White Ribbon

Sony Pictures Classics, $28.96

The voiceover narration at the beginning of The White Ribbon offers up the story as a collection of memories that the speaker hopes will “clarify things that happened in our country.” Given that the film is set in Germany just before World War I, and that the narrator is an old man reflecting on his days as the new teacher in a rural German village, it’s clear just what “recent events” he hopes to explain; the rise of fascism hovers over the action of the film as a threatened future and a possible key to understanding the story.

But does nascent fascism explain the puzzling incidents that, for a year or so, disrupt life in this small town? Or is fascism just another symptom? Things get off to a suitably nasty start when a horse stumbles on a trip wire someone has strung across the road. Both sinister and inexplicable, this prank is just the beginning of a season of motiveless malignity (to borrow Coleridge’s apt description of Iago). A child is kidnapped and beaten. A building is burned down. A worker is killed in a freak workplace accident. All is not well in this seemingly tranquil, cohesive community.

Leaving aside that unsettling voiceover hint about fascism, the film begins with the elements of a simple mystery: Who’s behind all this, and why is it happening? But Haneke, the man who brought us such dark explorations of the human heart as The Piano Teacher, Funny Games and Caché, does not traffic in Agatha Christie puzzles with tidy solutions. The answers are more elusive and more troubling.

One of the film’s neatest tricks is the way it plays on the history of horror. Early on, we are introduced to the blond children of the village, who move with creepy placidity and uniformity. Children of the Corn, anyone? But if the children, who we can’t help but think are going to grow up to be adults during the era of Hitler, seem sinister, so do the adults, especially those in positions of authority. The local baron treats the villagers like serfs; the doctor is a manipulative jerk who mistreats the widow with whom he is having a secret sexual relationship. The pastor ties his son’s hands at night to prevent masturbation. Haneke rejects any idyllic vision of old-fashioned village life, offering instead the past as an oppressive, barbaric nightmare ready to give birth to the horrors of fascism.

But Haneke eschews easy horror shocks, creating a sense of dread precisely through the reserve of his filmmaking. No crazy camera angles or menacing music here; Haneke’s approach is almost spartan, often shooting interiors by candlelight and relying on long takes and minimal use of close-ups to keep the story at a bit of a distance.

Adding to the aestheticization of the story is Haneke’s choice to make the film in black and white. He shot in color, since black-and-white film is virtually impossible to get, and then digitally converted the images to black and white. As Haneke has noted in interviews, this was no casual choice; he and his crew, used to color film, had to learn a whole new cinematic vocabulary. It was worth the effort.

The overall effect of Haneke’s refusal to sensationalize is that we are given a lot of room to think, and the things Haneke urges us to think about are not very nice. Though The White Ribbon may not “clarify” the origins of fascism, it opens a door on the cruelties large and small of which we are all capable.

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