White ribbon
Michael Haneke has earned a clutch of top awards recently for his direction of angsty German-speaking art-house movies. A White Ribbon, Austria's entry for the 2009 Best Foreign-Language Oscar, has done especially well in other award races. Should it have won the Oscar? The simplest answer is No, mainly because its screenplay only really appeals to intellectual sensibilities.
Technically, it's a superb accumulation of skilled work by its technical crews and actors. Filmed very aptly in sharp, piercing B&W, it's a depressing tale of a plague of evil that afflicts a rural, semi-feudal German farming community at the start of the 20th Century. In its severely Protestant environment, strait-laced adults and resentful teenagers seethe, conspire and hate.
It begins with a never-explained mystery - the village doctor deliberately trip-wired off his horse - and ends with an unexplained calm settling on what was shown for more than two hours to be a very troubled community. Does the movie, as many critics guessed, depict a repressed social background that may explain the subsequent rise of National Socialism?
Why does the parson, revealing his inner anguish as a loving and fearful father only to the movie audience and only once, treat his family and flock with such vehement righteousness? Would the enforced wearing of white armband ribbons have helped children appreciate their innate sinfulness, or merely reminded them how to hide their true feelings? Does a field of butchered cabbages represent more than the vengeance of a dead farmhand's grieving son?
Above all, what are we to make of the hopefulness and loving feelings of the community's anti-heroic outsider and commentator? He leaves the village in the end, and promises to explain how certain events came to pass in later years, thereby prompting many to see the movie as an allegory or morality tale.
But no precise explanations are offered, or clearly hinted at. Instead, there's a Bergmannesque iciness to the movie, a conscious refusal to draw conclusions. We end up, frustratingly, with a damning portrait of rural society at a certain period in history, but that's enough of an achievement to warrant Haneke's awards. The ensemble acting and cinematography create the director's disturbing review of human behaviour brilliantly, in an engrossing B&W spectacle.
Technically, it's a superb accumulation of skilled work by its technical crews and actors. Filmed very aptly in sharp, piercing B&W, it's a depressing tale of a plague of evil that afflicts a rural, semi-feudal German farming community at the start of the 20th Century. In its severely Protestant environment, strait-laced adults and resentful teenagers seethe, conspire and hate.
It begins with a never-explained mystery - the village doctor deliberately trip-wired off his horse - and ends with an unexplained calm settling on what was shown for more than two hours to be a very troubled community. Does the movie, as many critics guessed, depict a repressed social background that may explain the subsequent rise of National Socialism?
Why does the parson, revealing his inner anguish as a loving and fearful father only to the movie audience and only once, treat his family and flock with such vehement righteousness? Would the enforced wearing of white armband ribbons have helped children appreciate their innate sinfulness, or merely reminded them how to hide their true feelings? Does a field of butchered cabbages represent more than the vengeance of a dead farmhand's grieving son?
Above all, what are we to make of the hopefulness and loving feelings of the community's anti-heroic outsider and commentator? He leaves the village in the end, and promises to explain how certain events came to pass in later years, thereby prompting many to see the movie as an allegory or morality tale.
But no precise explanations are offered, or clearly hinted at. Instead, there's a Bergmannesque iciness to the movie, a conscious refusal to draw conclusions. We end up, frustratingly, with a damning portrait of rural society at a certain period in history, but that's enough of an achievement to warrant Haneke's awards. The ensemble acting and cinematography create the director's disturbing review of human behaviour brilliantly, in an engrossing B&W spectacle.
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