THREE TO SEE

Bright Star(PG)Jane Campion is at herpeak with a perceptive, subtly erotic studyof the love affair between the ardentFanny Brawne and the dying John Keats.

An Education(12A)Carey Mulliganexcels as a bright 16-year-old suburbanschoolgirl falling for a smooth con manin 1962 London.

Fantastic Mr Fox(PG)George Clooney,Meryl Streep and Michael Gambon lendtheir distinctive voices to an engaginganimated version of Roald Dahl’s novella.

however, until more than two hours intohis picture that its timespan is revealedas being from the early summer of 1913to August the following year. The neat,north German Protestant village has atimeless quality that, with the absenceof motor cars, gas and electricity andthe reliance on horse-drawn transportand rather primitive bicycles, suggests afeudal community at any time in the late19th or early 20th century.

At the top of the pile is the Baron,owner of the land and principal employer.Attached to his estate is a burly Steward,and the chief figures in the village arethe stern Lutheran Pastor, the Doctorand the 31-year-old Schoolteacher,who is insecure, immature and the onlyunmarried one among them. Everyoneelse works on the land and one thinksof them all as archetypes, capitalised asrepresentatives of their social positions.The film’s narrator, actually that familiarfigure “the unreliable narrator”, is theSchoolteacher. From his infirm voice,we infer he’s looking back on the eventsfrom old age and thus endowing themwith special significance, though this isnot spelled out.

The Schoolteacher interweaves twonarrative threads. One is personal, lyricaland nostalgic: he has fallen in love withthe shy new nanny caring for the Baron’sthree children. The other, dominant,thread is a series of apparent accidentsand atrocities that occurs in the village,beginning with the Doctor being seri-ously injured when his horse is trippedby a wire strung between two trees nearhis house. It continues with a farmer’swife falling to her death through rotten

floorboards at a sawmill owned by theBaron. Then the cabbages on the Bar-on’s land are destroyed with a scythe,there are two brutal abductions, a barnis burnt, a caged bird spiked by a pair of scissors and so on. Only in a couple of cases do we see what happens and whothe perpetrators are.

As with Haneke’s Code Unknown and Hidden, an air of mystery hangs over themovie and isn’t explicitly resolved. It’snever, however, less than lucid. Revenge isone possible motive and the children, who

move around together in a conspiratorialmanner rather like the blond children inBritish horror flickVillage of the Damned ,are involved in some way. Indeed, one of them claims to have dreams that foreseethe atrocities but the visiting police can’tdecide whether she’s overheard someplotting, is mentally disturbed or haspsychic powers.

The White Ribbon is a spellbinding movie, as exciting as a thriller, which,indeed, it resembles. Among other things,it’s about an unjust social system yokedto a repressive society that is morally andphysically disintegrating, though no one’s

prepared to confront it. The Baron tyran-nises his young Italian wife as if it werehis right, until she rebels against a world“blighted by malice, envy and brutality”.

In the name of his narrow religion,the Pastor thrashes and humiliates hischildren, forcing the two older ones towear the eponymous white ribbons of purity to keep them aware of their sinful-ness (the girl’s pride, the boy’s masturba-tion). The Steward, craven servant of theBaron, behaves violently towards his sons.The Doctor’s transgressive conductinvolves his daughter and the midwife. Yet despite all this, Haneke’s cool movienever lacks conviction or edges intomelodrama.

The picture is shot in a harsh, ele-gant monochrome and resembles CarlDreyer’s Days of Wrath and The Word ,both set in a similarly austere northernEuropean Lutheran communities. Butthe picture it most reminds me of isFassbinder’s elegant black-and-white E ffiBriest, a faithful adaptation of Theo-dor Fontane’s classic 1895 German novelabout the subjugation of a young womanby her aristocratic husband.

Another work that comes to mind isSpring Awakening , Frank Wedekind’ssensational play about sexual suppres-sion in pre-First World War Germany.Wedekind’s subtitle, “A Children’s Trag-edy”, is echoed by Haneke’s “A GermanChildren’s Story”.

In an interview in Sight & Sound mag-azine, Haneke mentions his admirationfor Fontane and he also refers to anotherinfluence, the great photographer AugustSander who in 1910 from his base inCologne set about producing a taxonomy

of German faces and archetypes that hecalled “People of the 20th Century”.He began with farm workers as they’reclosest to nature. The riveting faces inHaneke’s film have an uncanny resem-blance to Sand er’s.

The final long-held shot is an unfor-gettable tableau of the villagers gatheredin a small, bare church just after theoutbreak of war, a portrait of a nation onthe point of history. Luther’s “A MightyFortress Is Our God” is being played onthe organ, and the camera is viewing thecongregation from the position of thealtar, as if God himself is observing andinterrogating his creations.

FILM OF THE WEEK 

Numerous novelists, dramatists andfilm-makers have been attracted to theperiod immediately preceding the out-break of the First World War to givetheir work a touch of nostalgia, irony orhistorical resonance.

JB Priestley, whose life had beentransformed by his experiences on theWestern Front, was among the earliestwith his 1934 play Eden End , set in 1912

orkshire. Isabel Colegate’s novel TheShooting Party (filmed by Alan Bridgesin 1984) takes place at a grand countryhouse in 1913. István Szabó’s movie Colo-nel Redlcuts straight from its eponymousantihero’s death to the Austro-Hungar-ian army going into battle, though it wasas early as 1916 that the Austrian wit KarlKraus launched one of the last century’sgreatest cliches by having a newsboyenter a Viennese cafe shouting: “Extra!Extra! Archduke Ferdinand assassinatedin Sarajevo!”

Austrian film-maker Michael Hanekeuses this historical setting in his mas-terly The White Ribbon, winner of thisyear’s Palme d’Or at Cannes. It isn’t,

It’s as exciting as athriller but Haneke’scool movie never lacksconviction or edgesinto melodrama

In the village of the damnedMichael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner offers a spellbinding tale of bigotry and brutality in a feudal German community

PHILIPFRENCHCRITIC OF THE YEAR

The White Ribbon(137 mins, 15)

Directed by Michael Haneke;starring Christian Friedel, Ernst Jacobi,Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur

White Ribbon:‘The village has atimeless quality.’

MORE ONLINE Read Elizabeth Day’s interview withdirector Michael Haneke, at:

→→  guardian.co.uk/film