The White Ribbon (M). Director: Michael Haneke. Starring: Christian Friedel, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur, Burghart Klaußner, Rainer Bock. Running time: 144 minutes
German auteur Michael Haneke has been criticised for making films that are either cold and academic, or simply too clever for their own good. The villain in Funny Games, for example, breaks the fourth wall to implicate the audience in his acts of violence. This allows Haneke as filmmaker and cultural commentator to both have and eat his cake, by at once presenting a violent film and making his audience feel guilty about watching it. This is a nifty trick, although a scene where the villain uses a remote control to rewind and replay onscreen bloodshed is a postmodern twist too far.
Haneke's latest film, The White Ribbon, seems at first likely to head down a similar path. It contains a voiceover narration that begins with words to the effect of 'I don't know if everything I'm about to tell you is true'. This would seem to be a red flag. Perhaps our storyteller is donning the hat of the illywhacker, warming up to a far fetched yarn where truth takes a back seat to the sensational. Haneke, in turn, seems to be warming his hands for another bout of funny postmodern games.
But there's nothing so heavy handed at play here. To an extent, Haneke is simply offering a nod to the layers of subjectivity that exist whenever stories are told and listened too. In film, events are presented from the particular perspective of the filmmaker, and in turn are interpreted through the gaze of the viewer. In this case, there is the added subjective lens of an unreliable narrator. This does provide a further complication to Haneke's convoluted period drama.
It's subtle though, and easily forgotten once this bleakly elegant mystery begins to unfold. The narrator takes us to an early 20th century German village where as a young man (Friedel) he served as a schoolteacher. His story is punctuated by three violent events. The first is the hobbling of the local doctor (Bock) by a hidden tripwire. This appears to be a deliberate attack on the Doctor, but the motives and culprit are not apparent.
The subsequent acts acts of violence involve the sexualised beating of two young boys. The first of these is the son of the Baron (Tukur) upon whom many villagers depend for their livelihood. The