FILM OF THE WEEK ]
White Ribbon:
In the village of the damned
Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner offers a spellbinding tale of bigotry and brutality in a feudal German community
PHILIP
FRENCH
CRITIC OF THE YEAR
The White Ribbon
(137 mins, 15)
Directed by Michael Haneke;
starring Christian Friedel, Ernst Jacobi,
Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur
Numerous novelists, dramatists and
film-makers have been attracted to the
period immediately preceding the out-
break of the First World War to give
their work a touch of nostalgia, irony or
historical resonance.
JB Priestley, whose life had been
transformed by his experiences on the
Western Front, was among the earliest
with his 1934 play Eden End, set in 1912
orkshire. Isabel Colegate’s novel The
Shooting Party (filmed by Alan Bridges
in 1984) takes place at a grand country
house in 1913. István Szabó’s movie Colo-
nel Redl cuts straight from its eponymous
antihero’s death to the Austro-Hungar-
ian army going into battle, though it was
as early as 1916 that the Austrian wit Karl
Kraus launched one of the last century’s
greatest cliches by having a newsboy
enter a Viennese cafe shouting: “Extra!
Extra! Archduke Ferdinand assassinated
in Sarajevo!”
Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke
uses this historical setting in his mas-
terly The White Ribbon, winner of this
year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes. It isn’t,
however, until more than two hours into
his picture that its timespan is revealed
as being from the early summer of 1913
to August the following year. The neat,
north German Protestant village has a
timeless quality that, with the absence
of motor cars, gas and electricity and
the reliance on horse-drawn transport
and rather primitive bicycles, suggests a
feudal community at any time in the late
19th or early 20th century.
At the top of the pile is the Baron,
owner of the land and principal employer.
Attached to his estate is a burly Steward,
and the chief figures in the village are
the stern Lutheran Pastor, the Doctor
and the 31-year-old Schoolteacher,
who is insecure, immature and the only
unmarried one among them. Everyone
else works on the land and one thinks
of them all as archetypes, capitalised as
representatives of their social positions.
The film’s narrator, actually that familiar
figure “the unreliable narrator”, is the
Schoolteacher. From his infirm voice,
we infer he’s looking back on the events
from old age and thus endowing them
with special significance, though this is
not spelled out.
The Schoolteacher interweaves two
narrative threads. One is personal, lyrical
and nostalgic: he has fallen in love with
the shy new nanny caring for the Baron’s
three children. The other, dominant,
thread is a series of apparent accidents
and atrocities that occurs in the village,
beginning with the Doctor being seri-
ously injured when his horse is tripped
by a wire strung between two trees near
his house. It continues with a farmer’s
wife falling to her death through rotten
floorboards at a sawmill owned by the
Baron. Then the cabbages on the Bar-
on’s land are destroyed with a scythe,
there are two brutal abductions, a barn
is burnt, a caged bird spiked by a pair of
scissors and so on. Only in a couple of
cases do we see what happens and who
the perpetrators are.
As with Haneke’s Code Unknown and
Hidden, an air of mystery hangs over the
movie and isn’t explicitly resolved. It’s
never, however, less than lucid. Revenge is
one possible motive and the children, who
It’s as exciting as a
thriller but Haneke’s
cool movie never lacks
conviction or edges
into melodrama
move around together in a conspiratorial
manner rather like the blond children in
British horror flick Village of the Damned,
are involved in some way. Indeed, one of
them claims to have dreams that foresee
the atrocities but the visiting police can’t
decide whether she’s overheard some
plotting, is mentally disturbed or has
psychic powers.
The White Ribbon is a spellbinding
movie, as exciting as a thriller, which,
indeed, it resembles. Among other things,
it’s about an unjust social system yoked
to a repressive society that is morally and
physically disintegrating, though no one’s
prepared to confront it. The Baron tyran-
nises his young Italian wife as if it were
his right, until she rebels against a world
“blighted by malice, envy and brutality”.
In the name of his narrow religion,
the Pastor thrashes and humiliates his
children, forcing the two older ones to
wear the eponymous white ribbons of
purity to keep them aware of their sinful-
ness (the girl’s pride, the boy’s masturba-
tion). The Steward, craven servant of the
Baron, behaves violently towards his sons.
The Doctor’s transgressive conduct
involves his daughter and the midwife.
Yet despite all this, Haneke’s cool movie
never lacks conviction or edges into
melodrama.
The picture is shot in a harsh, ele-
gant monochrome and resembles Carl
Dreyer’s Days of Wrath and The Word,
both set in a similarly austere northern
European Lutheran communities. But
the picture it most reminds me of is
Fassbinder’s elegant black-and-white
Effi Briest, a faithful adaptation of Theo-
dor Fontane’s classic 1895 German novel
about the subjugation of a young woman
by her aristocratic husband.
Another work that comes to mind is
Spring Awakening, Frank Wedekind’s
sensational play about sexual suppres-
sion in pre-First World War Germany.
Wedekind’s subtitle, “A Children’s Trag-
edy”, is echoed by Haneke’s “A German
Children’s Story”.
In an interview in Sight & Sound mag-
azine, Haneke mentions his admiration
for Fontane and he also refers to another
influence, the great photographer August
Sander who in 1910 from his base in
Cologne set about producing a taxonomy
‘The village has a
timeless quality.’
THREE TO SEE
Bright Star (PG) Jane Campion is at her
peak with a perceptive, subtly erotic study
of the love affair between the ardent
Fanny Brawne and the dying John Keats.
An Education (12A) Carey Mulligan
excels as a bright 16-year-old suburban
schoolgirl falling for a smooth con man
in 1962 London.
Fantastic Mr Fox (PG) George Clooney,
Meryl Streep and Michael Gambon lend
their distinctive voices to an engaging
animated version of Roald Dahl’s novella.
of German faces and archetypes that he
called “People of the 20th Century”.
He began with farm workers as they’re
closest to nature. The riveting faces in
Haneke’s film have an uncanny resem-
blance to Sander’s.
The final long-held shot is an unfor-
gettable tableau of the villagers gathered
in a small, bare church just after the
outbreak of war, a portrait of a nation on
the point of history. Luther’s “A Mighty
Fortress Is Our God” is being played on
the organ, and the camera is viewing the
congregation from the position of the
altar, as if God himself is observing and
interrogating his creations.
MORE ONLINE
Read Elizabeth Day’s interview with
director Michael Haneke, at:
→→ guardian.co.uk/film