Full Cannes Film Festival coverage

It’s turning out to be an uncommonly interesting Cannes competition. The festival regular Michael Haneke (Funny Games, Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Hidden) returns this year with an extraordinary, rigorous drama set in a small village in Protestant Northern Germany in the years before the First World War.

Shot in sober black and white, with no musical score and told with a stately and deliberate pace, The White Ribbon is infused with a fascinatingly austere cruelty. As it focuses largely on the generation that would go on to embrace the tenets of national socialism, it is tempting to read the film as an allegory for the foundations of Nazi Germany in the psyche of its people. But as with much of his work, particularly Hidden and Code Unknown, Haneke leaves us with more questions than answers.

Narrated, as a distant reminiscence, by the village schoolteacher at the time in question, the film recounts a series of disturbing events that shatter the equanimity and repressed propriety of this seemingly model community. First, the local doctor is seriously injured in a riding accident — he and his mount are brought crashing to the ground by a concealed tripwire that no one can account for. The death of a worker in the local sawmill triggers more bad feeling — the dead woman’s son takes a scythe to the Baron’s cabbage crop as he holds him responsible for the negligence that caused the accident. The same day, the Baron’s young son is abducted, strung up and beaten. An even more unpleasant fate awaits Karli, the mentally handicapped son of the local midwife. Meanwhile, the barn is torched and the farmer whose son was responsible for the cabbage vandalism takes his own life. The village is being punished, but by whom?

It becomes increasingly clear that malice and spite are at work at every level of the community, from the cruel and disinterested ruling class to the bands of sharp-faced, serious children who seem to be drawn magnetically to any hint of tragedy. Discipline in the village borders on child abuse: the pastor’s children are regularly caned; they are forced to wear the ribbon of the title to signify the innocence and purity that the pastor believes only regular corporal punishment will achieve. Dig deeper, and the rot within the community is even more pernicious.

In contrast to the calculated cruelty in the village is the teacher’s courtship of the sweet, shy Eva, former governess to the Baron’s children. A carriage ride in the country is a warm and wonderful scene, and one uncharacteristically gentle for the ascetic, alienating Haneke. But ultimately it is the cold brilliance of this arthouse luminary and the uncompromising vision of his latest work that would seem to assure him of awards recognition.

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