December 30, 2009 [The White Ribbon]

Funny Games smiled politely from serial killer Henry's attic window—and slices open the mouth for Murnau's The Last Laugh, a game in reverse, high to low this time, rewinding itself (a fun camera-trick in Murnau's day, a cut-to-the-bone cheat in the home-video age) so that the victims' escape is thwarted. And Time of the Wolf was Panic in the Year Zero—but without any panic whatsoever. Caché shares Lost Highway's menace of surveillance, the mysterious tape left on the doorstep—although Caché's surrealism is less, um, comforting than Lynch's—if only because Lynch never loses his sense of humor. As he walks down the hall, Haneke calls out, and answers, and joins those other movies in the dark part.

And in The White Ribbon he walks a long long way into the silent era and World War I, and finds a black and white movie framed in medium shots for the people and long ones for landscapes, with voiceover filling in for title cards, a soft focus for faces pale, like silent movie actors, a look that seems somehow to have become extinct in the species. Was it the diet back then? The water? Maybe it was the sense that the Western world still needed horses and lamplight that gave them that look—at once less hurried and more anxious.

As The White Ribbon stretches out and holds on those faces, evil deeds multiply—and evil words (from, of course, the pillars of the community: Baron, preacher, doctor) spill out—but softly, like a memory (the schoolteacher is looking back as an old man at his youth, and you can hear it in his voice: some events have slipped his mind and vital details are gone). And these memories of sadism and scorn and hidden motives back there in a village of the second decade of the twentieth century spread before us, the years preceding the Great War filled with German uncertainty relieved by casual cruelty—but are we simply seeing the birth of Nazism? Maybe: the children, who seem so mysterious, so flatly impassive—inscrutable—will be in their twenties and thirties during World War II. But of course something else is going on here: a mystery about the nature of mystery. We want to round up the usual suspects and capture all culprits—but suddenly the narrator, our only tie to the story, lets us know that he was drafted into the war, then took over his dead father's tailor shop in another town, and never saw any of the villagers again. And that's all.