You just can't look away from 'The White Ribbon'

A doctor in a small German village is thrown from a horse after the horse trips on a wire. How did the wire get there? Was someone trying to murder the doctor? So begins Michael Haneke's hypnotic The White Ribbon, winner of the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language film, and a likely repeat victor for the same prize come Oscar night. (It also won the Golden Palm at last year's Cannes Film Festival.) As with Haneke's great Caché (Hidden), this absorbing, yet deeply elusive drama yields few answers to its many mysteries. Haneke creates an overwhelming sense of unease, and then invites the viewer to make sense of the seemingly senseless.

Set just before the start of World War I and narrated by the village's young schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), speaking from the perspective of old age, The White Ribbon appropriates the storytelling style of a classic Victorian novel. Dozens of characters shuffle in and out, as terrifying incidents multiply all around them. We meet the Baron (Ulrich Tukur), whose young son is subjected to a horrible, unexplained act of violence. We journey inside the house of the stern pastor (Burghart Klaussner) and his wife (Steffi Kühnert), whose children all seem distressingly remote and withdrawn.

As Haneke digs beneath the surface of these lives, he reveals a kind of rot that has taken hold. The Baron's wife (Ursina Lardi) is desperately unhappy. The pastor shames and belittles his children, demanding that they wear a white ribbon as a pledge to remain virtuous. The doctor (Rainer Bock) is carrying on an affair with a mistress, whom he treats horribly.

Photographed in shimmering black and white that evokes Nazi propaganda epics Olympia and Triumph of the Will, it's hard not to look on this film as a metaphor for an entire nation: The people of this village remain quietly, insistently oblivious as pure evil is spreading all around them.

Yet to reduce The White Ribbon to mere allegory would be to ignore the film's many other pleasures. If many of Haneke's previous films (see sidebar) seemed overly mannered, The White Ribbon has an expansive, more organic feel -- at long last, this is a Haneke film willing to take a few detours. As we follow the assorted wrongdoings, The White Ribbon also follows the teacher's tender courtship of the Baroness's nanny, Eva (Leonie Benesch) -- a hopeful romance that contrasts elegantly with the mounting dread in all of the other corners of the film.

Lest I've made any of this sound too academic, it should be emphasized that The White Ribbon is as gripping and engaging as any movie in the last year. If the ending is deliberately abrupt and vague, well, that's just part of the bargain with a Haneke film. The White Ribbon offers no solutions, only clues and possibilities. But in the way that it conjures up a completely plausible vision of the past that seems to speak volumes about our present and future, it pays the audience an extraordinary compliment: It allows us to think for ourselves.