From the Ledge

If  I’m on a date and the guy I’m with doesn’t get, doesn’t love, or even worse, has not heard of, Michael Haneke’s brilliant Cache, certainly top of the list among the best films of the ‘noughts, then I’m probably not seeing him after we’ve gone Dutch on the check that night.   I know, I know, it sounds so snobbish and condescending, but hey, I’m a guy who thinks you are the type of films you see (and if there’s any mention at all of Judd Apatow, or yes, Na’vis, in the course of the date, I’d be surreptitiously calling for my cab home while he’s in the bathroom).  Cache, the story of a French family who keeps on receiving videotapes of themselves under surveillance from an unknown source, is one of the most intellectually challenging, psychologically provocative, and artistically impressive films I’ve ever seen, with a perfect Gordian knot of a screenplay that allows its themes to linger, disturb and provoke you days, no, even months, after you’ve seen it.  I didn’t think Haneke could ever top Cache, but he comes quite close to doing so with his latest film, The White Ribbon, the deserving winner of many, many film prizes including the Cannes Film Festival Palme D’Or last May, the European Film Awards Best Picture last December, and the Golden Globes Best Foreign Language Film last weekend (and the pleasure of seeing Haneke, truly one of our times’ great directors, humbly, somewhat bewilderedly, accept his prize, more than makes up for the sight of  James Cameron winning the Best Director award for that Wii video game masquerading as cinema, Avatar).  Sure, The White Ribbon is infuriating, chilly, dense, and slow-moving at times (some of the reasons which keep it, in my opinion, from surpassing Cache as Haneke’s personal best), but more importantly it’s also powerful, intelligent, sophisticated, and visually stunning all the time. 

 The title refers to the, well, ribbon, that the strict, unforgiving pastor of a remote German village in 1914 forces his children to wear publicly for any perceived infraction against purity and goodness.  Children are not only publicly humiliated in this strongly authoritarian feudal community, they are also physically, psychologically, and sexually abused by the adults – who are also either morally dubious (the village doctor is having an affair with the midwife, the pastor acts morally superior but is willing to lie to protect his family) or socially ineffectual (most of the farmers are grudgingly beholden to the Baron who owns the lands they work in; the schoolteacher is not taken seriously by others probably because of his youth). But there are more violent things happening in the village as well– two children are found badly beaten, one of them to near-blindness, a suspiciously placed wire trips the doctor’s horse and causes the doctor to break his collarbone, a middle-aged female laborer dies after falling through loose floorboards in a barn, which later in the film is mysteriously burned down.  In typical Haneke fashion, he never tells you who the culprits are and why he/she/they did what they did (you’re left to draw your own conclusions, especially after seeing the final scene) but he does tell you, via voiceover remembrances of the now-elderly schoolteacher that the events of this year in this particular German village may clarify what happened in the country years later.

 Many reviews of The White Ribbon, and even Haneke himself in his interview with Le Monde, talk about the film as portraying the roots of Nazism in Germany.  These abused pre- and pubescent children (who would be in their 20s and early 30s twenty years later, in 1934, during the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party), because of their early experience with fear, intolerance, dictatorship, and violence as a way of life, will become more prone to turn into fanatics who will use these same things to embrace and advance a heinous ideology.  Even if they do not participate directly, they will turn into silent conspirators, who will look the other way, as most of the German population did during that period (very powerfully brought home by the scene in which one of the girls insists she dreamt of one of the children’s beatings, proclaiming premonition and denying receiving any foreknowledge of the event, even under threats and loud slaps from the town police).  For the most part I get it – environment drives behavior.  But tantalizingly, I think Haneke also makes a point that people, even children, have an intrinsic meanness and propensity to do wrong in them.  There’s the doctor verbally abusing his mistress, the midwife, for no apparent reason; there are the steward’s sons who nearly drown the Baron’s son because he is able to carve a whistle on his own and they couldn’t.  Malice and brutality is in our blood and our core nature, and that potentially some cultures may tend to surface this core nature more than others (the German national culture in this case), due to it’s social strictures (a feudal landscape, a deep Protestant religiosity, a generation-defining event such as World War I) – an intriguing, cynical inference, and highly polarizing. 

 There are so many other rich threads in Haneke’s screenplay that I can’t even begin to parse.  The midwife who has a mentally challenged son and who is emotionally maltreated by the doctor is seen by the villagers as paying for the “sins” of the generations that went before her (what these sins are, of course, Haneke doesn’t say…hey this isn’t Avatar’s screenplay where everything needs to be slowly…explicitly…pointed…out).  If this is seen as Haneke’s commentary on German cultural guilt and complicity, then he seems to be saying that the German population will never be freed of the remembrances of the Holocaust for years and generations to come, regardless of what they do.

 Christian Berger’s black and white photography is breathtaking (actually Haneke shot in color and used a process to drain the colors away) with many scenes looking like black and white images of Flemish paintings (the workers in the field, shots of the town covered with snow, the burning barn, etc.).  The night scenes have an impressive quality of dreaminess and malevolence, which heightens the more mysterious and more chilling aspects of the narrative.  The period design is flawless, the music evocative, the acting strong.  It’s the children though, all uniformly excellent, looking and acting like they all came from a casting call for a bizarre performance piece combining Children of the Corn with a kids’ version of Dogville mixed up with traces of Bad Seed, who are haunting, captivating, and utterly unforgettable.  Without any artifice or exaggeration, the young cast of The White Ribbon subtly yet firmly bring to life Haneke’s thesis on the capability of people for collective evil.

Tags: Michael Haneke