In an era dominated by movies that either hug or numb the audience, Michael Haneke’s unvaryingly disturbing films have divided critics and moviegoers.
You could be glib and call pictures like “The Piano Teacher” (2001) and “Cache” (2005) feel-bad movies, but Haneke’s determination to explore tough material without worrying how it might play with audiences is an admirable trait in a time of Hollywood focus groups and test marketing.
Haneke has a “take it or leave it” attitude toward responses to his work.
Three years ago, the German director was drawn and quartered in this country for doing a bruising remake of his 1997 film “Funny Games” transferred to contemporary America — critics who embrace the campiness of slice-and-dice shockers were outraged that a German dared to lecture Americans on the numbing effects of their violent pop culture.
Last year, Haneke bounced back — on this side of the Atlantic — with his most widely seen movie to date, “The White Ribbon” which debuted on home video last Tuesday (via Sony Pictures Home Video), and is already proving to be a very popular rental.
Perhaps because Haneke dealt with a German village in the years just before World War I, U.S. art house audiences were able to distance themselves from the filmmaker’s tough study of the evil that men (and women and children) are capable of when they can do their dirty deeds within a closed community that on some level shares their darkest impulses.
American audiences can’t seem to get their fill of stories about the origins of the Nazi Party, so many people here embraced “The White Ribbon” as a movie that tries to explain how Germans could support Hitler within the next decade or so — i.e. the aggressive evil in the German DNA.
Haneke gave interviews in which he said the film was a study of “What made…the children in the years prior to World War I…the grown ups of 1933 and 1945…susceptible to following political Pied Pipers?”
But, as anyone who has seen an earlier Haneke film knows, the German views all of humanity through cool eyes willing to look at the darkest impulses of people everywhere.
In the press notes for “The White Ribbon” the director said he believes his tale of class hatred, jealousy and revenge in a small German village 100 years ago can be applied to other places and times: “The willingness to follow ideological Pied Pipers arises everywhere and in every age. All that’s needed are misery, humiliation and hopelessness, and the longing for deliverance swells up. Anyone who promises salvation will find followers, and it doesn’t really matter whether theirs is a right- or left-wing ideology, a political or a religious doctrine of salvation.”
“The White Ribbon” operates on many different levels — historical drama, suspense film and horror movie — as Haneke begins with the everyday life in the German village and then keeps peeling away layers.
The movie is chilling and disturbing but Haneke’s abundant gifts as a writer and director exert a tremendous pull on the viewer.
When asked why all of his movies have been so unsettling, the director said, “Audiences are having mainstream cinema and television touch on only the surface of things, and they get irritated when confronted by a more exacting gaze into the depths of our existence. But since its beginnings in the Greek tragedies, hasn’t drama sought to examine the depths of human existence?”
