The White Ribbon, dir. Michael Haneke (2009)

A friend once told me: “keep with highbrow, but distrust respectable.” I’ve always found it a useful dictum. When thinking about Michael Haneke’s latest film—the one that took the Palme D’Or at Cannes—nothing comes to mind more than respectable. The film manages to achieve a level of nauseating respectability on par with Schindler’s List, featuring pensive black and white photography, truthfully cinematic long takes, eastern European austerity, classical music, and a self-important relationship to historical events. These clichéd cues, somehow, seem to have been enough to satisfy hoards of hungry film critics around the world who appreciate mature, elegant, and adult filmmaking from Haneke.

Essential to this degree of respectable filmmaking are tired themes and clichéd directorial choices: the camera which stays respectfully outside a closed door as a severe father canes his children, a young boy who asks, sweetly, whether everyone must die; a voice-over that reminds us these events may not have happened precisely as they are remembered, a handicapped child beaten and bloody. Unwittingly, The White Ribbon devolves into a parody of something that could have been great cinema and would have been associated, perhaps, with Carl Theodor Dryer.

Can Haneke, though, be so easily dismissed as pretentious kitsch? Perhaps not: it could be that the parody into which this film falls is not so unwitting, and that there is a great joke behind the cruelty of this film, as there have been behind so many others. The film could be, alternatively, a characteristically self-satisfied joke: it could be that Haneke the Sly has found these hallmarks of disgustingly respectable filmmaking and filled them with his own brand of nihilism and meaninglessness, only to regurgitate them as a filmic joke on the callousness of such celebrated films? The end of the film, after all, in which the town congregation takes a seat to watch us as we’ve watched them, amounts to a kind of wink and nod from the director.

Towards the beginning of the film—when the narrator warns the audience that what he remembers is, perhaps, not what has happened—one is immediately struck by the uselessness of such a remark. It is a uselessness of which Haneke must be aware: it is difficult to question the reliability any the image, especially in its black and white austerity, and for this reason the narrator’s remark is almost immediately forgotten. Further, the remark is so easily disposable because it bears no relationship to whatever plot The White Ribbon can be said to have.

The film is a kind of tranquil, violent mystery: acts of violence are occurring in a small German town on the eve of World War One, and no one knows who is responsible. Children are tortured, a pet bird is beheaded, and the town doctor is tripped while galloping on his horse. Yet the film seems more like an exercise in plotlessness sprinkled with harsh explosions. Often the film chooses to focus more on the useless, cruel details of the relationships between children and their fathers than on the mysteries themselves. At the end, the “historical atmosphere” of the time and place, which the narrator, at the beginning of the film, suggested these events could explicate, cynically ties them together. Yet the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the coming of the Great War are such blatantly unsatisfying dramatic mechanisms that it becomes nearly impossible to think Haneke can be serous.

If this is so—that the film itself is an elaborate and obnoxious joke that has become the European art film par excellence—isn’t hating the film the closest one can come to appreciating it? Then fine. Either way, I simply can’t hold myself back: I just hate this film.