Until I got out of the cinema, I hated every minute of Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, the infamous Austrian filmmaker’s new feature, which concerns the troublesome population of a North German protestant village in the months leading up to WW1 . I found the film overbearing, heavy-handed and hostile. Yet, I was surprised how quickly its 144-minute length flew by. And how much I thought about the movie on the walk back from the cinema.
Perhaps these thoughts were born out of the film's rather melodramatic content. There is a lot of shock and awe punctuating the story, the plot is a veritable catalogue of suffering; there’s the torture of a disabled child, excessive cruelty to animals (and people), suicide, murder, arson and implied sexual abuse of children (some of it incestual). If taking the film on face value, it seems unfeasible that all this could happen in such a small village in such a short space of time. These scenes are invariably short and cut with harsh, jagged and unsentimental edits. Haneke’s technique leaves no room for breath or elegant segues into other scenes. Several of the juxtapositions this creates are truly shocking. The fact that a lot of this happens off-camera, and an especially effective use of implication through soundtrack, knowing glances and, indeed, editing is hard to stomach. It also doesn’t help that the film is devoid of any context, political or otherwise.
Only after the film did the themes click. Firstly, Haneke is looking at the Second World War from its very origins (the society which gave birth to these individuals). Secondly, he is asking questions of nature and nurture, which can be attached or separated from any political context. And also he is interested in the idea of evil begetting evil (again, something that may or may not have anything to do with the origins of WW2). He has fashioned a tale which develops these ideas and asks many questions relating to them all. Proceedings have to be extreme, and a little contrived, for this discussion to work. Haneke strips away all politics and focuses exclusively on the human angle. It’s a bold move.
It’s a film of complication and ambiguity. Although the viewer leaves the cinema on an elegiac note (the narrator telling us that the village’s inhabitants would never all be together in the same place again, to the sound of a choir singing), it is clearly not a rose-tinted view of an ‘innocent’ pre-war Germany. The implication in the film is that there is little innocence in this place, that even the children are not beyond suspicion concerning the heinous acts portrayed.
If I still had a complaint, I would say Haneke can be a little glib. Two reasons; his refusal to discuss politics makes this an incomplete argument (it’s like giving you the recipe to something, and failing to tell you how long and how hot to cook it) and, secondly, his detached vitriol invites harsh judgements at the role of the church, the misogyny of the depicted men and the dated education system which are all condemned rather than explained. These are subjects ripe for discussion and criticism, but he is quick to pour scorn and accuse, and slower to provide answers and understanding. It’s this artfully precise, but icily detached, approach which frustrates and alienates.
Could the events of The White Ribbon happen at any time, or just in this society, in these conditions? Haneke does everything but answer the question. Which is both the film's chief pleasure and its chief frustration.
