My favourite Cannes winner: The White Ribbon
|
Version 0 of 1. One of Cannes’ particular pleasures is the weightless, out-of-body sensation you experience during the first few minutes of a film you know almost nothing about, but which immediately reveals itself as an unarguable masterpiece. I remember blundering into a late-night screening of an absolutely unheralded Amores Perros – then universally referred to as “the Mexican dog movie” – and feeling my jaw drop a few centimetres during the opening car chase sequence. I had a similar experience with a film with almost zero advance buzz, which turned out to be a little number called City of God; it was so staggeringly brilliant I felt forced to immediately rush into print. Cannes is like that: with the vast majority of the films there having their world premieres, there’s no expectation other than the track record of the people involved, and the Cannes marque itself. The Man Who Wasn’t There, Requiem for a Dream, Waltz With Bashir, Dogville, Persepolis, Gomorrah: the list of happy surprises goes on. (It also works the other way: I’ll never get back the hours I spent watching Match Point, The Matrix Reloaded and Grace of Monaco.) None of them won the Palme d’Or, though. Over the decades, many great films have (I reserve a soft spot for Barton Fink), and one or two awful ones. But the most perfect of the list, and the one with which I most deeply felt the above sensation, was The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke’s pristine, diamond-hard fable set in smalltown Germany in the years before the first world war. It won the Palme in 2009, but is now, rather weirdly, overshadowed by Haneke’s follow-up triumph, Amour, which won the Palme three years later. I wouldn’t want to take anything away from Amour, because it is undeniably harrowing, an intimate, domestic horror movie of frightening impact. But to my mind, The White Ribbon dwarfs it, cutting so deeply into our shared culture and history it feels like a scalpel separating flesh from bone. Examining what Haneke called “the roots of evil”, this study of an authoritarian, conformist social order – the town functioning as an obvious microcosm – makes its points with unforced subtlety. On the one hand, there is the small tribe of children, living a regimented, sacramented existence akin to a knightly order. And on the other, the baffling acts of violence that emerge as if from under the skin of an infected body politic. Haneke films everything with forensic clarity and monochromatic beauty, but it only serves to make his film even more disorientating. As an answer to the question that haunted WG Sebald – how could such a sophisticated, apparently moral society eat up entire sections of its own with so little remorse or reflection, both before and after the event? – it is unmatched, at least in cinema. Both perfectly straightforward and utterly opaque, it hit heights rarely achieved elsewhere. Cannes should be proud of honouring it. |