"The White Ribbon" directed by Michael Haneke. In German, with subtitles.
This is an imperfect but very powerful film about a particular Protestant German village, in a particular time, 1913. The movie does not boil down to simplistic maxims about paternalism or repression, as some reviewers have suggested. It does show a drama of how people commit and respond to evil, and there's no single maxim you can put on that.
It is a well crafted film. The details of the characters' lives, their clothes, their hair, their manners, the flies in summer -- it all made me think that this was how it had to have been. There's a lot of Bergman-like cinematography here.
Is it possible that the village children committed the crimes depicted in the film? We don't know for certain. The schoolteacher who narrates the story has his suspicions. There are several scenes in which a window's curtains are drawn, the window opened suddenly, and there they are -- the group of them, blond children, presumably innocently inquiring about the health of a stricken classmate. I found myself gripping the arm rests. It's like a Hitchcock horror film in those moments.
It may be that the film's story dramatizes one of the deep currents that led to the rise of Nazism twenty years later -- that intimate, brutal repression results in the repressed himself committing small and large acts of evil. Of course, Nazism had many other roots (the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the economic and social chaos after WW I, the German longing to recover and avenge their lost territories, and on and on), but those are themes for other movies and stories.
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