It’s 1913, the eve of the first world war and the setting is an isolated rural village in Germany. With a backdrop of an idyllic landscape, there lies a repressive tightly-knit community, which under the mask of normalcy bubbles a dysfunctional society, menaced with bursts of unsolved anonymous grotesque acts of crime. A concealed tripwire throws a doctor off his house and he is badly injured, a barn is set on fire; and young children are beaten and found abandoned, one a Down’s Syndrome boy who is flogged to near blindness. Who are the perpetrators? Director Michael Haneke (Funny Games, Cache) keeps us guessing throughout. A village shrouded in secrecy, it would seem almost everyone has a motive.
A midwife (Lothar) and mother of the handicapped child is cruelly tormented in an affair with the doctor whom she learns is abusing his 14-year-old daughter. A man takes revenge on the precious crop of the baron (Ulrich Tuker) after his mother is killed at the farm’s sawmill. Central to the film is the pastor (Klaussner), a brutal disciplinarian who doles out barbaric punishments to his children, strapping his son (Leonard Proxauf) at bedtime to cure him of his ‘sickness’ of masturbation. After each severe whipping for any trivial perceived wrongdoing, he brandishes his offspring with a white ribbon, a symbol of purity that of course has echoes of the Jewish yellow star in the years to come that will similarly humiliate its wearer.
As brutal as these men seem to be, the children may indeed be worse, their repressed anger driving them from child to sociopath fuelled by the cruelty that they are forced to endure.
But not everything is dark. There are moments of innocence and humour as we see the chaste romance between a 17-year-old nanny (Benesch) and the older chubby-faced bespectacled teacher (Christian Friedel) who, now an old man, narrates the events.
The plot proceeds with unnerving calm, slowly building tension in a celebral context providing an eerie feel to the film. This, coupled with excellent cinematography; the film was shot in colour and digitally transformed into black and white.
The films ends in mystery but is wholly satisfying. It is the teacher who notices that the same wolf-like pack of blond children, led by the pastor’s eldest daughter, that always seem to be around after each horrific event. He takes his suspicions to the pastor who angrily rejects his claims. And life simply goes on, as before.
Certainly, Haneke creates a sense of both implication and foreboding – the latent psychopathic seeds of Nazism in the second world war. Further still, lessons are to be learnt; not only does the film shadow society of past but for the present too – think of the Middle East. This is perhaps Haneke’s finest hour.
