Michael Haneke’s village mystery is a patient, deeply unsettling study of adults teaching children to fear authority. Its severity can become repetitive, but the performances and Christian Berger’s black-and-white photography make the long scrutiny worth enduring.
The White Ribbon is a disturbing film about what children learn from the people entitled to punish them. Michael Haneke sets his mystery in a German village before the First World War, where malicious incidents disrupt a society already practised in making people afraid. He makes those incidents absorbing while directing our attention to the ordinary conduct of the adults. We recommend it, with a warning that its 144 minutes demand patience and offer little relief.
Christian Friedel gives the schoolteacher a gentleness that helps us stay with such harsh material, and Ernst Jacobi’s older voice supplies the recollection. Friedel makes decency credible without turning the teacher into someone we have been instructed to admire. The teacher’s courtship of Eva, played by Leonie Benesch, matters because Haneke lets affection occupy some of the same film as cruelty. We were moved by their awkward sweetness; after so much adult severity, the effort to be kind felt almost startling.
Christian Berger’s black-and-white cinematography is precise enough to make us study faces even when we would prefer to look away. The formal compositions suit a community in which everyone has an allotted place, and their restraint makes the violence harder to dismiss as a passing disturbance. Christoph Kanter’s production design gives the village a convincing historical solidity without inviting us to enjoy the past as somewhere cosier than the present. The care taken over these surroundings matters: the cruelty belongs to an inhabited place, with homes and institutions that people accept as normal.
Burghart Klaußner’s pastor makes religious authority feel oppressive without requiring us to imagine a monster from outside the village. Ulrich Tukur’s baron occupies another part of the same hierarchy, and the performances give these positions a weight that an explanatory speech would struggle to supply. The children are especially unsettling because they make fear and obedience difficult to separate. We found ourselves watching them for evidence of what the adults had taught them, a suspicion Haneke encourages without making the young easy to read.
Monika Willi’s editing gives encounters time to become uncomfortable, and the deliberate pace usually works: we begin examining behaviour that a quicker mystery might hurry past. There are stretches, though, when Haneke seems to be confirming a judgement we have already made. Once the connection between humiliation and obedience is clear, another demonstration of adult cruelty does not always deepen it. We wanted a little less insistence here. The film’s control can make these people seem selected to prove a case, particularly when so many relationships return to fear.
The usual pleasure of a whodunit comes from narrowing the field of suspects. Haneke makes that habit feel inadequate in a village where respected adults already practise intimidation. The setting before the First World War encourages thoughts about the politics these children might grow up to accept, but taking them all as future fanatics would make the film too simple. The teacher and Eva are important here, because their tenderness also belongs to this community.
Give it an evening when nobody needs cheering up. The slow pace makes it tempting to divide your attention, but the faces need watching, especially the children’s. We would leave some time afterwards to talk about the parents.
