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The White Ribbon, the new film from arthouse heavyweight Michael Haneke, is a work of startling psychological brilliance. Has he managed to top the knock-out originality of Hidden(Cache)? Perhaps. It is certainly his most beautiful and his most profound work to date — a film that feels more reserved, yet in scope, is much more ambitious. Here, Haneke is less interested in making moments that leap out at you than creating whole passages of time that crawl under your skin with his unique style of cerebral dread.
The story is set in a German village just before the outbreak of World War One. It is narrated by The School Teacher (Christian Friedel), looking back as an old man upon a series of bizarre incidents in the town. The doctor is trip-wired off his horse. A woman falls to her death in a mill. The young child of The Baron is abducted and beaten. The disabled child of The Midwife is tortured. Meanwhile, the village's children, who make up the choir, could hold the key to what is going on.
But the central mystery of the film is less of a concern to Haneke. With novelistic attention to detail which he films in lustrous black and white, he uses the puzzle as a platform to dig into the psychological underpinnings of this village — in particular, the strict form of Protestantism that regulates all manner of emotional life.
The White Ribbon is a study of the tyranny of religious purity. Haneke teases out how the town is enslaved by patriarchal religious doctrine — a cold, clinical, ultra-rational approach to human behaviour which is ultimately irrational in effect. The children are burdened with spiritual guilt and psychological punishment. Haneke is exploring how children become warped by emotional cruelty as a way of life. The unspoken implication is that these are the children who grew up to be Nazis. Yet it is a work that addresses any form of terrorism or totalitarianism.
Haneke's studies of the children's faces, in luminous, spiritual close-ups, recalls the 1928 silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc, by another austere master, Carl Dreyer. The images here resonate with innocence and suffering and a deep repression of feeling. The mystery in the film goes unsolved, but the stakes have moved on to something metaphysical. Solemn as it is, The White Ribbon blooms with moments of tenderness and humanity. This is a film of accumulative power — its achievement is how Haneke takes an entire society in the film's grasp. It is the work of a mature master.
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