AWARDS:
NOMINATED: 82nd Annual Academy Awards: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography
WINNER: 2009 Cannes Film Festival: Golden Palm - Michael Haneke; Fipresci Prize - Michael Haneke; Cinema Prize of the French National Education System
WINNER: San Sebastian International Film Festival: Fipresci Film of the Year: Michael Haneke
REVIEW:
Has any director, European or otherwise, made as many top-rate films this decade as the Austrian Michael Haneke? CODE UNKNOWN (2000); THE PIANO TEACHER (2002), in which Isabelle Huppert gave one of the great performances in recent times; the eerily-apocalyptic TIME OF THE WOLF (2003); HIDDEN (2005): leaving aside his misguided English-language remake of FUNNY GAMES, and sidestepping the question of whether it's possible to like a Haneke film – they can be so ascetic and severe as to make that verb seem a little wan – it's hard to deny that the ex-movie critic has created one of contemporary cinema's most formidable bodies of work.
Now, with THE WHITE RIBBON, he has out-done himself and produced the best film of his career, a tightly-wound, fully-fleshed and thoroughly mesmerizing drama set in a north German village during 1913 and 1914. It depicts a tightly-knit aristocratic estate in which everyone, from the local pastor and doctor to toiling Polish migrant labourers, knows their place. This brings them stability and food on the table. On the surface everything is fine. Then, as is so often the case in Haneke's films, a small incident disrupts the calm, exposes that calmness as illusory, and starts a train of events that threatens to overwhelm the whole social order.
It begins with a doctor (Rainer Bock) being badly injured after his horse stumbles over tripwire. Then a woman dies in a sawmill accident; her son, blaming the Baron (Ulrich Tukur), goes out and shreds his cabbage crop. Soon, a barn is set on fire. A child is beaten and tortured. Who is responsible for all these crimes? Why are they carrying them out? Haneke keeps us guessing with the skill of the best thriller directors.
The film, elegantly photographed by Christian Berger, was shot in colour and then digitally transformed into black and white. This helps not only to evoke the period in which it's set, but to create a useful mistrust: Haneke wants us to be a little estranged from what's going on so that we're in a better position to carry out a forensic analysis of the drama, to study rather than to identify with the characters and their emotions. telegraph.co.uk
