In "The White Ribbon," even the youngest are guilty

Hello all! I decided to write my first review on last year's Palm D'or winner at Cannes, "The White Ribbon." A bit ballsy, perhaps, but I hope I've done the film justice. Here's a trailer for those of you who haven't seen it:

In the opening shot of Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon,” the quaint silence of a country road is suddenly broken when a horse trips over a taut wire strung between two trees. The man atop the horse is thrown from it, and afterward he writhes in pain on the ground. The injuries he sustains require him to be carried off to a nearby town, and as the sole doctor for his village, he leaves his patients equally helpless. As a widower, he leaves his two children helpless, too. Set in a small German town shortly before World War I, “The White Ribbon” presents an increasingly dystopian web of various residents’ lives as even more strange events occur. A woman dies in a freak work accident, a building is torched, a man hangs himself, and children are beaten and mocked in a Whodunit devoid of the glamour of a period piece and the causality of a classical Hollywood film.

Indeed, like the near-invisible wire that brings chaos into an otherwise quiet world, a sense of tension pervades “The White Ribbon.” The action is always out of our grasp, one step ahead of us and always off-screen, but that’s what makes the film so intriguing and engaging. After Klara (Maria-Victoria Dragus) and Martin (Leonard Proxauf) confess to their pastor father that they strung the wire, they are led to be beaten before their siblings, but the door shuts before the viewer. As if it were an unwelcome visitor, Haneke’s lens lingers in an empty hallway in a long take. The children’s muted wails serve as the only reminder of what goes on in the next room.

Like Haneke’s 2005 film “Caché,” this one doesn’t allow the children’s youth to protect their innocence. The teenage daughter of the doctor (Rainer Brock), Anna (Roxane Duran), must raise her younger brother Rudolf (Miljan Chatelain) during the absence of her father and explain in one scene the concept of death when Rudolf asks. She does so with a stoic maturity beyond her years that is justified when the doctor and his gross sexual abuses against Anna return to the home. In a similar sense, the white ribbons signifying purity which the pastor forces Klara and Martin to wear are rendered ineffective —Martin attempts suicide and Klara leads a pack of young minions who seem guilty of quite a bit of the havoc wreaked about town.

Although “The White Ribbon” is in black and white, the aesthetic of the film is no less resonant, and cinematographer Christian Berger showed me that his Academy Award was well-deserved. He filmed in color and drained it away to create sun-drenched pastoral scenes and perfectly lit interiors that complement Haneke's shot composition like a Vermeer painting. The prevalence of gray does more justice to the shroud of mystery that covers the town, in my opinion, than any amount of color could. It echoes the eerie silence of the film’s soundtrack that lasts until the final scene.

Macabre content aside, "The White Ribbon" is a refreshing and encapsulating piece of work. Michael Haneke reminds us that, despite the flashy excess of the “Avatar” generation, some of the best cinematic moments are those which force the viewer to imagine, and that some of the most chilling and enigmatic moments in film can be achieved with no color at all.