White Ribbon - The silent horrors

Another Cannes winner. Use of natural light and the pace of the movie makes it true to the lives and times it represent. Of so many World War movies I have seen, this makes it closest to my idea of reality then existed. It is not just photography or color treatment, but body languages of the actors and especially that of the child actors make it flawless.

The bicycle they ride and how they handle things, there so much thought that was put into each character. Story shows a puritan pastor, a doctor and the baron - how it revolves around these three poles in a fictitious protestant village Eichwald - they represent kind of sub surface aggression and nodes of societal tension in the pre-worldwar era in Serbia.

There is a narrative of a school teacher that tells the bizzare incidents taht remains unresolved

There is no closure to many things but that is not the point of this story. How everything changed and became irrelevant with imminent War. This movie depicts what was that everything that existed before war and new value system it brought in. Pastor represents the close walled religious hypocracy, the baron the disregard of the powerful to the reason and fairness towards people he rule, the malicious doctor, the widower with degenerated values.

The white ribbon the pastor asks his son to tie stand as a reminder of the innocence and purity he lost. He makes them feel guilty about natural instincts and inflicts his own values on them.

There are some scenes that transport you to that age - when schoolteacher goes to meet Eva's parents, the conversations between man and his woman - Baron and baroness post dinner, doctor and midwife, schoolteacher with Eva in carriage.

The movie was shot in color and then treated frame by frame to remove traces of modern age. it shows. Haneke is capable of handling big canvas of a village and succeeds in delivering his message. Creates the tension without much of images of violence and horror and shows that terrorism and oppresion in different age can be equally disturbing without of the actors realising that are being subjected to it.