One of my problems is that I’m prone to listening to hype and letting it build and multiply in my head. I blow all this hype up to proportions so massive that virtually nothing lives up to it. When a trailer emerges, I literally watch it hundreds of times, mulling over the details like a deep meditation. I avoid reviews like the plague for fear of spoilers, but out of a craving for information I have to fight the urge to go on Rotten Tomatoes and read every single critical review. Q&A sessions, IMDB user reviews… it just escalates until the point where the film is destined to disappoint. Considering my recent Haneke-fest I thought I’d be overhyping The White Ribbon, desperately seeking an untouchable, unquestionable masterpiece, but to be perfectly honest it was exactly as I imagined it’d be: freakin’ phenomenal.

I got into Michael Haneke’s work this year. Around the time I saw The White Ribbon I’d just completed his filmography (not including the Funny Games remake and his two television films) and Hidden had become one of my favourite films. So you can perhaps understand what I was going through when I say I convulsed during the opening credits. It might seem a bit strange, as the film’s credits consist of a black screen, no accompanying music and a small, white set of credits (not to mention that he’s used these same credits before in Code Unknown, Time of the Wolf and possibly The Piano Teacher, my memory fails me), but goddamnit, there was something indescribably epic about those silent, minimalistic credits. Then, with bated breath, the film began.

The White Ribbon takes place in a pre-WWI German village where a series of crimes occur. A doctor is injured while riding his horse; several children go missing and then are discovered, tortured and abused; there are acts of unexplained violence towards animals, and a whole other string of strange occurences. The children are brought up under strict discipline and religious dogma, and after one of the children confronts his father – a priest about a sin he has committed, he is forced to wear a white ribbon in public as a reminder to himself and to others of the concept of purity and innocence, and the importance of retaining this innocence for the good of the future.

I can say that The White Ribbon has been the most emotionally distressing film I’ve seen since Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, which I saw two years ago, a film that moved me so much I swear I cried out at least a quarter of my bodily fluids. It is especially sad, bearing in mind what Haneke said about the children being destined to become the seeds of Nazism. In typical Haneke fashion, the film is a psychological headache; the characters never seem to have clear motives for their actions, whether it be killing a little boy’s recovering parrot or suicidily balancing on a bridge’s rungs, the actions (and sometimes crimes) aren’t pre-meditated or even meditated, they just occur as naturally as cleaning your teeth or having a shower; purely run on an instinct twisted and torn from years of destructive, abusive discipline. The scene with the girl and the parrot is particularly perplexing as she doesn’t even seem consciously aware of her actions. It’s as if she’s hypnotised.

Although in the past his characters have been highly and disturbingly realistic, especially the more psychologically unsound characters, Haneke achieves something very rare for him in this film: a real human connection with the characters. There’s a touching, heartfelt romance between two of them, the School Teacher and Eva. Now that’s something I never thought I’d see in a Haneke movie, humanity portrayed in a positive, hopeful light. There were fleeting moments of this in Time of the Wolf but nowhere near as prominently.

The cinematography in this is just too beautiful for words. Shot originally in colour and in a HD digital format, it has been colour graded to black and white to fit in with the time period. The low-key, almost pitch black interior shots are incredibly haunting and constantly filled me with a sense of unease and fear. And speaking of digitally altered images… does anyone else find it strange that Haneke used a CGI horse instead of a real one, considering his track record? Fish flailing to death in The Seventh Continent, a tazered pig in Benny’s Video, a dog beaten with golf clubs in Funny Games, a horse shot dead in Time of the Wolf, a beheaded chicken in Hidden; it all seems very weird that Haneke would have a moral crisis going as far as replacing his flesh and blood animals with some delicately rendered ones. Perhaps that’s just the direction he’s heading in, making films for a new audience. Apart from the recent Funny Games remake, this is probably Haneke’s most accessible film.

The White Ribbon is by an indescribably long shot my favourite movie of 2009, and will certainly make my decade list. Go out of your way to see this.

Rating:

The White Ribbon has won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

You can find more Haneke Haneke-nisms here:

http://www.projectorheads.com/2009/10/haneke-haneke-haneke-and-more-haneke/