‘The White Ribbon” is one of the finest films that ever repelled me, a holiday in the abyss.
This year’s winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or, written and directed in stark black-and-white by Michael Haneke (“Funny Games,” “Caché”), is both simple and complicated, sweeping and narrow. Though no violence worse than a slap is ever shown being committed, “The White Ribbon” is so steeped in the awful that the proper response is a shudder.
The film is a grim parable about a series of mostly inexplicable acts of cruelty that take place in a German-speaking village in an unspecified, pre-electrified age. At the start, a doctor is severely injured when his horse is tripped by a wire strung between two trees as a trap. His injury and the death of a village woman seem to ignite a series of attacks — against animals, people, property.
Some involve physical torture and bloodshed, others mere words, yet all are shocking, bordering on unbearable.
What is the source of all this inhumanity? Haneke raises the issues of class, sex and strict Protestantism, but seems to discard them. Much of the violence comes in retaliation, suggesting a moment of forgiveness by anyone could break the chain of malice, but when a boy watches blankly as a much younger boy makes a whistle out of a reed, then throws the smaller kid into a stream, the sense is of an indelible and fundamental capacity for evil.
The movie isn’t political — until suddenly it is, when history barges in. It would be spoiling things to give away Haneke’s punch line, which seems to be either too pat or an expansive solution to the cosmic mystery.
Your admiration of Haneke’s work is likely to depend on whether you gaze upon the heart of man and see sewage. I don’t, and the film strikes me as bitter, itself a kind of attack. Yet Haneke’s cool control allows him to build a stately architecture of wickedness. Polluted souls stand out against poised compositions and tidy details — hair drawn back in buns, the lines of churches. The darker his theme, the more brilliant his execution.