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All's quiet on the north German front -- for now. Life in a little farming village there seems perfectly calm and ordinary at the outset of Michael Haneke's Oscar-nominated "The White Ribbon," set during the year before the outbreak of World War I.
Suddenly, a series of unsettling events begins. A wire strung across a road trips a horse ridden by the town doctor (Rainer Bock), who is severely injured. A woman falls to her death through the rotten floorboards of an old sawmill. A nursery window is left open -- or deliberately opened -- in the dead of winter, exposing a newborn to pneumonia.
Accidents, revenge crimes or random acts of sadomasochism?
The village schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) is driven to unravel the mystery -- then and now, many years later, as our narrator. He introduces us to the baron (Ulrich Tukur), the local landowner-employer-moral authority. A whole field of the baron's cabbages are beheaded with a scythe. One of his sons disappears. He makes a speech in church, imploring his villagers to turn in the culprit -- to no effect.
Much of the story's focus is on the town's frighteningly strict pastor (Burghart Klaussner) and large family. Early on, he ties a white ribbon to the arms of eldest son Martin and daughter Klara, obliging them to wear the ribbons constantly as a reminder of their need for purity and innocence. Martin (Leonard Proxauf) has been caught masturbating. The pastor doles out harsh, Teutonic punishment: The camera stays doggedly fixed on the closed door of his study, while the agonizingly delayed beating is not seen, just heard -- far more terrifying.
- Starring: Christian Friedel, Burghart Klaussner, Rainer Bock.
- Rating: R for disturbing content involving violence and sexuality.
Other memorably unsettling images include the washing of the dead millworker's body: As with Martin's caning, the camera never moves but is bolted in position at an angle that never lets us see her (or her grieving husband's) face, only to see the flies hovering and to hear the disturbing ambient noise.
Disturbing is too weak a word for the ghastly sexual encounter and dialogue between the doctor and his housekeeper -- and for the creepy kids, with their zombie-like group behavior. They look as possessed as Linda Blair on a bad "Exorcist" day -- especially poor Martin, with the dark circles beneath his tormented eyes.
Thank God for the wonderful performances of Mr. Friedel as the sweet teacher and Leonie Benesch as the adorably shy girl he wants to marry. They make for the film's sole benign relationship among otherwise menacing characters and plot threads.
Gradually, the teacher is drawn toward the suspicion that the likely suspects in these crimes might be the victims. Have the kids formed a secret violent society? Is it a consequence of how they've been abused and repressed themselves? Does their brutally ingrained obedience contain the seeds of future brutality that will explode when they're grown-ups?
Offhand, you'd say there's enough bad seeds in this village to sow a whole 40-acre section of misdeeds. That would be consistent with director Haneke's previous, equally dark and cryptic films, from the S&M shocker "Funny Games" (made not once but twice, 1997 in German and 2006 in English) to his brilliant "Piano Teacher" (2001) and his bleak "Time of the Wolf" (2002) -- all grimly downbeat to the edge of despair, or one step over it.
Mr. Haneke first planned "The White Ribbon" as a three-part TV miniseries saga. But here it is in its two-hour, 24-minute glory as an Academy Award nominee for best foreign film and best cinematography -- the only black-and-white film so nominated in the latter category.
Some -- but by no means all -- things are clarified in the final visuals. It's a kind of audience-interactive whodunit, calling on the viewers' imaginations to fill in the blanks of a truly mesmerizing film.
Opens Friday at Regent Square Theater.
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