The White Ribbon

It remains to be seen whether "Das weisse Band" becomes the kind of movie that everyone shows in German class the way "Good bye, Lenin" "Männer" and "Das Leben der anderen" were taught in almost every upper-level language course until every student had seen it thrice.

Nevertheless, Michael Haneke has a made a film that every German professor will compulsively watch again and again (not a big market admittedly). Buy the DVD and stare at the last shot to figure out who is standing next to whom.

The film is stunning, clever, confounding, in many ways like his earlier mystery "Cache." As with "Cache" the last shot seems to suggest an answer to the story's mystery, but we will have to look at it slowly to find any possible clues. It took me eight viewings to catch the final revelation in "Cache," but already on the first viewing the final shot in "Das weisse Band" suggests strange positions. Why is the Pfarrer seated with the congregation of the church in the last shot? At whom are the villagers looking? What person is in the position of the camera?

Das Weisse Band makes so many allusions that we will be writing about it for years. At first glance, it evokes Fassbinder's "Effi Briest" and Edgar Reitz's "Heimat," perhaps Schlöndorff's Törless, too. But there is more than a little Stephen King in the flick as well. The innocent children stand there all blond and blank-faced denying any knowledge of the nasty tricks plaguing the village. The story is a Max und Moritz tale without the humor to distract from the brutality, instead we get a great deal of sanctimonious covering up of crimes that foreshadow the Nazi genocide. But those historical references are made lightly and late in the film. On the face, the film could just be a belated indictment of Wilhelminian Prussia.

Haneke sets shots up like paintings. He creates the look of Adolf Menzel or Ferdinand Georg Waldmuller, but without the sentimentalism. There is a long shot of a man emerging from a tree-lined road that harkens Caspar David Friedrich. He directly quotes Menzel's famous painting of Friedrich der Grosse playing a flute concert in Sanssouci. Like Fassbinder, he chooses to shoot the historical drama in black and white.

Unlike other psychological treatments of proto-Fascism, Haneke does not exclude women from participating in violence. Patriarchy comes across with snarling insults and boots in the gut, but women, the Pfarrer's Tochter, in particular, is among the scariest organizers of secret punishments. In the end, the film shows a society run by fear and beatings.