The White Ribbon
A great leap forward after the regressive and pointless remake of Funny Games. Haneke’s moralism has a much more ambitious scope – the kindred relations between fascistic and religious thought – but its precision is razor sharp. One of its central images chillingly articulates the single-minded purposefulness of rationalized brutality: the camera follows a farmer’s son from behind as he methodically plows through a landowner’s plot of cabbages with a scythe. Haneke holds at length on the rather banal act of vengeance, and its straightforwardly presentational destructiveness anticipates savageries that are perpetuated later with an equally perfunctory fervour. Particularly nightmarish is the mathematical precision by which a pet bird is placed dead centre on a pastor’s desk – a pair of scissors protruding from where its head should be. While one might find Haneke’s claim that the film addresses “the origins of terrorism” to be unconvincingly grandiose, The White Ribbon still remains a frightfully convincing representation of the ease by which cruelty can be cultivated and perpetuated within insular communities.
Rating: * * * *
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