"The White Ribbon" (shot in black and white) takes place in a small, rural village dominated by three hard-nosed authority figures - a wealthy baron who owns and dominates most of the productive land, a rigid Protestant minister who sets the unforgiving religious agenda, and a physician with the worst bedside manner this side of Dr. Lecter.
The movie opens just as the medical man suffers a serious injury from a riding mishap that is not accidental. Someone deliberately tripped his horse by stringing a wire in its path.
This malicious act is the first of several that soon plague the isolated village: a child is tortured and humiliated, then another, and even routine accidents take on ominous, almost supernatural dimensions. The townsfolk edge closer to paranoia, fear, suspicion, recrimination, revenge.
Haneke, true to form, is very deliberate. The (140 minutes) story is achingly slow to unfold, and Haneke is focused, with creepy enthusiasm, on the gruesome details of the way victims are mistreated, particularly the children, particularly the pastor's own.
The white ribbon of the title turns out to be a tool of shame - the minister ties one to the arm of his eldest son and daughter, a public reminder they have failed to uphold his standards of purity and innocence. Yet the more he and others tighten the vise, the worse the unsolved crimes become.
I've in the past grown impatient and exasperated with Haneke's oppressive sense of control, but there is something in "The White Ribbon" that feels eerily personal, almost confessional.
The ruthless authority that the minister exerts over his own children and their behavior echoes the control that Haneke exerts over his characters, and the perverse acting out that arises from it seems to explain something about Haneke's work.
The demons in his "Ribbon" are said to be Germany's, but I wonder if some may be his.
