It is customary to begin a review with a summary of the plot, but that isn’t always easy with a Michael Haneke film. The White Ribbon is deliberately confusing, and we’re never quite sure what’s happening or why. It’s set in a small German village in the run-up to the First World War and begins like a whodunnit, with the locals being terrorised by a series of anonymous criminal acts. However, it gradually becomes clear that the two policemen brought in to investigate are never going to solve the crimes.
Does this matter? Haneke pulled off a similar stunt in Hidden (2005), leaving the central mystery tantalisingly unresolved, and viewers of that film had a right to feel cheated because it was marketed as a conventional thriller. But few people will go to see The White Ribbon expecting all the story strands to be tied together. On the contrary, the wilful avoidance of narrative orthodoxy has become such a hallmark of the Austro-German director that his fans would be disappointed if The White Ribbon did come to a satisfying conclusion. In Haneke’s films, the Mounties never get their man.
While the director avoids anything as vulgar as revealing the identity of the perpetrators, he does drop some pretty heavy hints. The local children are furtive and shifty, as if harbouring some terrible secret, and you begin to suspect that Haneke’s main inspiration for The White Ribbon was Village of the Damned (1960), the British horror classic. Of course, he would never let the audience off the hook by suggesting that there’s a supernatural explanation for the children’s behaviour. The cause here is something more endemic. His black-and-white camera roams around this rural landscape like a dispassionate anthropologist, painting a portrait of a community that is morally bankrupt from top to bottom. If the children are guilty of carrying out these atrocities, it is because they are re-enacting the sins of their fathers.
One obvious reading of The White Ribbon is that it’s about the origins of Nazism. After all, most of these children will be sporting swastika armbands in the not too distant future, herding Jews into cattle wagons. Seen in this context, their sadistic nature takes on an ominous significance. At one point, the schoolteacher narrator (Ernst Jacobi) says that the events he’s describing “could perhaps clarify some things that happened in this country”.
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Having opened the door to this interpretation, Haneke typically rejects it as too simple-minded. “I will not be happy if the film is seen as a film about ... the Nazi time,” he told The New Yorker. “It’s a film about the roots of evil.” In other words, Haneke is not just another self-loathing Northern European trying to explain the wrong turning his people took in 1933; he is a misanthrope on a grand scale. The theme of The White Ribbon turns out to be the same as all his other films: homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man.
That is why Haneke refuses to solve the puzzle at the end. If the culprits were identified and led away, that would offer the audience a false sense of reassurance. It’s not mankind that is evil, we would conclude, just a few twisted individuals. Once society has been cleansed of these bad apples, we can carry on living our lives untainted by sin. As far as Haneke is concerned, such expiation isn’t possible. Not for him the easygoing Roman Catholicism of the multiplex. He retains the severe puritanical outlook of his Protestant upbringing.
Ironically, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that such deep-rooted pessimism may itself be a source of comfort. If Man is essentially an aggressive creature, requiring only the flimsiest of excuses to set upon the weak and the vulnerable, then that lets the Austro-German people off the hook. According to Haneke’s view of mankind, there was nothing exceptionally evil about the Third Reich; it was just an extreme expression of a universal human trait. No need to feel guilty, then — or, at least, no more guilty than any member of the human race. The message of this disturbing, nihilistic film is that we’re all Nazis at heart.
15, 143mins