15, Selected nationwide release

White Ribbon

MICHAEL HANEKE is a director who deals in haunting ambiguity. Nothing is ever clearly defined in his films. The viewer is invited to become a detective, seeking to unravel the mysteries at the heart of Haneke’s brooding, enigmatic stories.

It is an approach that pays dividends in The White Ribbon, a rich study of malice and misunderstanding with echoes of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Ibsen’s An Enemy Of The People.

The White Ribbon is set in a small German village in 1913. It is shot in the kind of ravishing black and white that reminds you of an Ansel Adams photograph. The surface impression is one of hard-working, God-fearing individuals living in relative harmony with the land and each other.

The first sign that something may be amiss comes when the doctor’s horse is deliberately tripped up. Later, a woman dies in what appears to have been a workplace accident. Her son takes revenge on the local baron.

The catalogue of strange incidents continues as a widower commits suicide and a nanny is fired. It is as if something is poisoning the community’s spirit.Suspicions grow, anger†and resentment creep into the gentle†flow of everyday existence.

The White Ribbon provides no easy answers. The whole story is told by the local schoolmaster many years after the events and he remains baffled as to what really happened. However, you assume that what happens in the village is a microcosm of the fear and violence that would take hold in Germany over the coming decades.

The film depicts a loss of innocence on the eve of global catastrophe and a stark warning of the emotions that were to shape and warp 20th century history. It won Haneke the Palme D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and is one of the most intriguing and thought-provoking foreign-language releases of 2009.

Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Ulrich Tukur, Susanne Lothar, Josef Bierbichier, Mercedes Jadea Diaz, Burghart Klausner
Screenwriter: Michael Haneke
Certificate: 15
Running time: 144 mins
Country: Austria/Germany/France/Italy
Year: 2009

© Allan Hunter, 2009

Please note – the image shown is a still from Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (Artificial Eye, 2009)

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