Best films of the noughties No 5: The White Ribbon (original) (raw)

As the decade progressed, the reputation of this German-born Austrian director increased almost exponentially. His movies were difficult, extreme, painful and confrontational; yet a box-office smash with his surveillance nightmare Hidden took him out of the arthouse ghetto and in 2009 he won the Cannes Palme d'Or for this period movie made in black-and-white.

Set in a remote Protestant village of northern Germany in 1913, the film is about an outwardly placid rural community which is in fact repressive and plagued with anonymous acts of retaliatory malice and spite. The authorities clamp down further, and so the cycle goes on. There is no clear solution to the puzzle of who is carrying out these acts. The mystery simply deepens. But it is clear that the village children hold the key. We are witnessing the conditions that shaped the Nazi generation. This is the genesis of tyranny and fear.

At the centre of the film is the village's fiercely disciplinarian pastor, played by Burghart Klaussner. The pastor insists on a family tradition of the "white ribbon" which his wife dutifully prepares from her sewing box. His children, if they have sinned, have to wear the humiliating band tied around their upper arm until their father is convinced that they cleansed. The white ribbon could be the ancestor of both the Jewish yellow star and the Nazi party armband. Yet nothing is ever made explicit.

The icily exact imagery and composition is avowedly based on the photographs of August Sander (Sander has an eerie picture of a uniformed German soldier, gazing serenely into the camera lens, which has in its background a village very like the one in The White Ribbon), and also the work of dramatists such as Frank Wedekind and Max Frisch.

Part of what makes The White Ribbon so involving is that in it, for the first time, Haneke shows some gentleness and even humour. The sub-plot about the village schoolmaster's shy courtship of a local woman is a delicate and touching human drama: it has warmth, in contrast to Haneke's usual existential chill. The White Ribbon is an unforgettable, deeply mysterious film.