The White Ribbon

Raising kids is no picnic. Do you hit or hug? Punish or praise? Is there a peaceful way to prepare a person for a lifetime on earth? These are the overwhelming questions elegantly explored in writer-director Michael Haneke’s Oscar-nominated oeuvre, The White Ribbon.

The year is 1913 in the fictitious town of Eichwald, Germany. The peasant farmers of this Protestant village answer to the authoritative figures of a regal Baron (Ulrich Tukor) and an austere pastor (Burghart Klabuner). Stability thrives under their strict rule until a series of violent acts strike the community. A farmer’s wife dies mysteriously at the sawmill, and the baron’s son is kidnapped and brutally beaten during the harvest festival. As the violence persists, the film is narrated from the distant perspective of the town school teacher (Christian Friedel) who observes these crimes as sinister suggestions of the looming World War.

Awarded the Palme d’Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and Oscar nominations for best foreign language film and achievement in cinematography, Haneke’s bleak Ingmar Bergman-esque film cuts deep into the foundations of human character. Here, Haneke subtly uncovers the roots of the evil he exaggerated in Funny Games and Benny’s Video, filming in the modest color palette of black and white and muffling acts of brutality behind closed doors. Each character is perfectly cast, and Haneke draws arresting performances from both the veteran actors and the infants. Cinematographer Christian Berger masterfully guides the camera through the homes of Eichwald like a dispassionate ghost, conjuring an eerie claustrophobia reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick. This style leaves audience members to be voyeurs of the film’s forbidding feudal world until Haneke reveals its place in historicity.

The children of this village are the products of fear, the heirs of a society tortured by an anonymous violence. Is it any wonder that theirs would be a future of cruelty?