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What might come as a surprise to those familiar with Haneke's work is the gentle, sinless romance that builds at the center of The White Ribbon between a school teacher and a young woman named Eva (Leonie Benesch). It is from a later time and with the pangs of wisdom and helplessness that the nameless school teacher (Christian Friedel) narrates the happenings in his home village preceding the Great War. Filled with kids named Gustav and Rudolph and adults named only for their earthly tasks, Haneke's anonymous village achieves narrative lift from the radiating reactions that the set of perverse actions summons forth in them.
Amongst these reactions: The village pastor punishes his kids and makes his two eldest wear the titular woven band. It is a symbol of innocence and though his film has devastating cultural and historical implications, Haneke's more fervent fascination is with how innocence and sin are both learned and assumed in existence. The children all possess the basic indicators of innocence but their demeanors as much as their faces range from cherubic naïveté to splintered repression. But what they are taught -- a strict reading of God's laws -- and what they see are dissimilar and their allegiances become first-and-foremost to God. Their imposing of His wrath takes the form of punishing not only their elders but of a rich boy and a young handicapped child.
These children would grow up and support -- if not found -- the National Socialist movement but Haneke is careful not to corner his film or let it stand as pure symbolism. The White Ribbon is richly drawn and complexly layered in its crisp and perfectly calibrated black-and-white landscape of shadowy house interiors and beautiful, light-drenched exteriors; a work of immense dread built on a doomed community rather than a smattering of barking ideologies. The school teacher's courtship and a poor, widowed farmer's family may not be implicit in the children's surreptitious punishments but they are likewise troubled and affected by the bedlam.
Only in the film's last quarter does someone start suspecting that the children are those responsible but the viewer is meant to feel like the moral crimes perpetrated by the adults are more substantial than the atrocities committed by the children throughout. Haneke, in fact, is elliptical when it comes to acts of degrading innocence: The attacks on two boys, the murder of a cherished pet, a child's molestation and the caning of two siblings are all conveyed through their early stirrings and their ultimate effects, nothing more. The violence, bred from idealized indoctrination, gives off an eerie, unshakeable feeling of déjà vu and indeed, the film's pristine aesthetic and bleak thematic palate help shape The White Ribbon into what already feels like a nightmare lodged in our collective cinematic memory.
Aka Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte.
