AKA Das weiße Band (Kindergeschichte)
Directed by
Michael Haneke
Writing credits
Michael Haneke
The memories of an unnamed elderly tailor form a parable from the distant year he worked as a village schoolteacher and met his fiancée Eva.
The setting is the fictitious Protestant village of Eichwald, Germany between July 1913 and August 1914, where the pastor, the doctor and the baron rule the roost over women, children and peasant farmers. The puritanical pastor leads confirmation classes and gives his pubescent children a guilty conscience over trivial offenses. He has them wear white ribbons as a reminder of the innocence and purity from which they have strayed. When his son confesses to impure touching, the pastor has the boy’s hands tied to the bed frame. The doctor, a widower, treats the village children kindly but sexually humiliates his housekeeper (the local midwife) and takes advantage of his teenage daughter at night. The baron, who is the lord of the manor, underwrites harvest festivities for the villagers, many of whom are the immigrant workers in his employ. He may summarily dismiss his twins' nanny Eva for no apparent reason yet defend the integrity of the farmer whose son has taken his revenge on the baron with the destruction of a field of cabbages.
Mysterious things happen. A wire is stretched between two trees causing the doctor a terrible fall from his horse. The farmer's wife dies at the sawmill when rotten floorboards give way; her grieving husband later hangs himself. The baron’s young son goes missing on the day of the harvest festival and is found the following morning in the sawmill, bound and thrashed with a cane. A barn at the manor burns down. After the steward's daughter has a violent dream about the midwife's handicapped son, the boy is attacked and almost blinded. The pastor finds his parakeet cruelly impaled after his daughter has opened the bird's cage with a letter opener in hand. The midwife commandeers a bicycle from the schoolteacher to go into town, claiming that she has evidence for the police given to her by her son. She is not seen again, and neither is her son. On the same day, the doctor's family vacates the premises, leaving his practice closed.
The schoolteacher's growing suspicions lead to a confrontation in the rectory, where he suggests to the pastor that his children have severely bullied the weaker in the village. Offended, the pastor immediately threatens him, warning that he will face disciplinary measures if he repeats his accusations again.
The film ends at the time of the declaration of war on Serbia by Austria–Hungary, with the conclusion in church on the day of a visit from the narrator's prospective father-in-law. Disquiet remains in the village but nothing has been discovered and no one accused. The narrator left Eichwald, never to return.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1149362/
