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.

Shutter Island, dir. Martin Scorsese (2010)

As Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo approach Shutter Island by ferry, what strikes us is the sky: it goes on forever in a way that anyone from Boston knows is impossible, and the artificiality of the colors and the actors makes it clear that this isn’t Changeling or Schindler’s List. This is the past of film, not a film of the past, and it’s clear that Scorsese is taking his cues from Samuel Fuller’s camp experiments as much as Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological obsessions, tossed with a dose of Hiroshima Mon Amour.

The film itself is unerringly harrowing, composed of uneven realities interwoven with hallucinations and dreams that are puzzling without being gimmicky. The only mystery here lies not in DiCaprio’s identity but in his non-identity: why can’t he be what he is now? The film posits that DiCaprio’s own trauma has become inseparable from the trauma of the 20^th century: his drowned children are the same children that lie in the Dachau snow. Yet by the end of the film, when all has been “revealed,” Scorsese has done such a good job rendering any revelation arbitrary that it rings more like a parody of a reveal than a true moment of enlightenment.

One of the film’s best moments comes when DiCaprio—fighting with an escaped inmate in the wave of a devastating storm—hears a brief exegesis on the hydrogen bomb. “Why would I ever want to leave here?” asks the violent psychotic. “They have H-bombs out there.” One of the most powerful poles of the 20^th century—the bomb itself, the object that turned everyone paranoid and had everyone hiding under desks, next to filing cabinets. It’s from these 20^th century sciences of destruction—clunky and creative, the American wartime avant-garde—that Shutter Island takes its potency.

In line with this, Shutter Island recognizes that it was in the Holocaust that the 20^th century found its most terrifying and emblematic manifestation of all its potentiality. Everyone in the film looks like a Nazi, and whether or not they are is irrelevant. Within the first half hour we’re struck by flashbacks showing gaunt faces and barbed wire, paperwork residue of the Nazi machine floating serenely in a concentration camp office that looks, replete with filing cabinets, eerily functional and familiar. Mad scientists and totalitarianism: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union…and to complete the triumvirate, we need FDR and the United States, don’t we? Where was our Holocaust, our Gulag? That’s what Detective DiCaprio is looking for—the place where the United States caught up with the 20^th century.