'The White Ribbon'

The Austrian-German filmmaker Michael Haneke is associated with movies that are painful to watch, cruel movies like "Funny Games," a horror story about two young psychopaths who enjoy torturing a suburban couple, and "The Piano Teacher," about a sado-masochist (Isabelle Huppert) who can't stop abusing herself, in more ways than one.

Haneke liked the plot of "Funny Games" so much, he made the movie twice -- in 1997 in German, and a decade later in English, with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as the thoroughly battered couple. His latest movie, "The White Ribbon," is about pain inflicted on people, but Haneke no longer seems to feel it necessary to show us the actual infliction, at least not all of it.

Bad things happen in "The White Ribbon" -- indeed, the movie is about bad things happening to people for no apparent reason -- but much of the time they happen off-screen, or at a distance. This may or may not be a sign that Haneke has matured, as a person or as a filmmaker, but "The White Ribbon" seems much more three-dimensional than some of the director's earlier films because it seems less like an arrogant, gratuitously sadistic attack on the sensibilities of the audience.

"The White Ribbon" takes place in a German village on the cusp of the First World War. The important men in the village are a baron, a doctor and a pastor. All of them are guilty of mistreating children, women or those who are subordinate to them. At the same time, all of them or their families are victims of violent, vicious acts that come without warning. The villagers have no idea who is doing these seemingly vengeful things; and the community, already a nest of hypocrisy and pettiness, is on the verge of being torn apart.

There is, believe it or not, an element of sweetness in the story, as we watch the young schoolteacher who is the voice-over narrator fall in love with a local girl, but bitterness and suspicion are the primary moods.

We are told at the beginning of the movie that it "could perhaps clarify some things that happened in this country." The implication is that the children who grew up in the vituperative and abusive atmosphere of the village, with the threat of a terrible war on the horizon, would become the adults who embraced the Nazis two decades later. Indeed, in an interview, Haneke has said as much:

"The question that my film deals with always is how you condition people so that they are ready to follow an ideology. You find the conditions are always identical regardless of the time and place. There is a deep unrest, a deep social unrest, a sense of helplessness and humiliation, and with those conditions, people are already desperate to grab at any straw to save themselves. Usually, those straws are ideological. What the film [addresses] is how the form of social conditioning leads us to be open to grasp at those ideologies."

In "The White Ribbon," which is somewhat reminiscent of the stories of small-town bitterness in Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," Haneke presents a rich, complex portrait of the malign nature of relationships that can spring up in a small and isolated village. By creating such believable and even, at times, sympathetic characters, Haneke has risen above the crude misanthropy of some of his too-blatant earlier work to present a nuanced, rounded vision of the infectiousness of evil.

The movie is strikingly filmed in cold-surfaced, rigidly geometric black and white that is appropriate to the theme. Although it is two hours and 15 minutes long, it keeps the viewer's interest through a suspenseful plot that intertwines the lives of about a dozen principal characters. The movie may not be a lot of laughs, but it has something to say that is worth listening to, and it says it very well.

Opens Feb. 26