Dir. Michael Haneke, Austria , 2009, 144 mins
Cast: Ulrich Tukur, Susanne Lothar, Burghart Klaussner, Janina Fautz
Review by Philippa Bradnock
Michael Haneke's film The White Ribbon opens with a horse and rider tripping and falling to the ground. There is always something shocking about a horse falling, its awkwardness and fragility, and the implications of broken equine bones. And for an audience inured to cinematic violence against people, violence involving animals jolts us nastily. Of course that is precisely Haneke's intention; the master of unease and unsettlement wants us off-balance from the get-go.
Those familiar with Haneke's mind-games and manipulative anti-manipulation, will recognise the sense of discomfort his work evokes. The White Ribbon stays true to this and also revisits earlier themes. Society at large is corrupt, authoritarian and violent. Families and lovers are cold and cruel to each other – one scene between the doctor and his adoring partner the midwife recalls the exquisite degradation of The Piano Teacher , as he dispassionately lists all that disgusts him about her.
But in many ways this new film is quite different. It follows a series of violent and unpleasant events in a German village on the eve of the First World War. These begin with the felling of the local doctor and his horse and move to arson attacks on a local barn and beatings meted out to several village children. The local teacher narrates the events in voiceover as he remembers the story.
This pseudo-historical setting marks The White Ribbon out from Haneke's earlier, contemporarily-set work and enables him to show a cross-section of society. Haneke has moved from targeting the bourgeoisie in his early work to interlinked, multicultural societies in Code Unknown and Caché and now to this complex feudal village, covering everyone from the lord of the manor to the farm labourer, who falls from his favour.
The film is far from a straightforward period drama however. It presents a mystery: who is behind the attacks? But there are no answers, only multiplying loose ends and a slow deepening of that queasy dread triggered by the horse's fall. The unease is also marshalled to a greater historical cause – the voiceover relates these events to ‘what happened in my country'. Are these crimes supposed to exhibit the seed of National Socialism, the start of a spreading moral bankruptcy?
But Haneke has always had as much in common with Von Trier's tricksy cine-scepticism as Loach's social commentary and even as it claims historical significance, the film undermines its own realist aesthetic. 'I don't know if the story I'm about to tell you is entirely true,' says the voiceover. What then are we to believe?
The White Ribbon won the Palme D'Or at this year's Cannes film festival. It is visually stunning, a product of the capabilities of new digital shooting and post-production technology. The black and white has a wonderful depth and clarity, and the characters' faces are translucent, almost glowing with an other-worldly intensity. That other world is certainly not heaven – the film is preoccupied with hidden horrors of human manufacture. In The White Ribbon , Haneke has conjured an elliptical and insidiously beautiful vision of hell.
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