Michael Haneke's 'The White Ribbon'

If you've never seen a film by the Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke, be forewarned: You approach his work at your own risk, as you would a steep cliff, an angry spouse or a ticking time bomb.

No one ever accused Haneke of banality, sentimentality or pulling punches. Pushing buttons? Yes. Trafficking in sadism, cruelty or shock tactics? Sure. Unleashing incendiary social or moral critiques? No doubt. Challenging, angering or irritating audiences? Absolutely. Since he began fashioning films more than three decades ago, the 67-year-old auteur has served up the following cinematic provocations: an indictment of violence-as-entertainment featuring two young psychopaths in tennis whites who torment a vacationing bourgeois family ("Funny Games"); a rigid, self-mutilating classical musician (Isabelle Huppert) with a penchant for sadomasochism ("The Piano Teacher"); a postapocalyptic fable that conjures a world that's nearly devoid of human benevolence ("Time of the Wolf"); and the tale of a middle-class couple unraveling into a poisonous stew of mistrust and paranoia when an unseen voyeur begins videotaping their every move ("Caché").

For Haneke's latest, "The White Ribbon," which opens Friday, the filmmaker has crafted an austere black-and-white parable that, like much of Haneke's oeuvre, shines a harsh and unflattering mirror up to society. Winner of the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival and the top prize at the European Film Awards, "Ribbon" issues a stinging commentary on the dangers of sexual and social repression and indoctrination into a rigid ideology. Needless to say, viewers may not like what they see. "The film is about how people are manipulated into following an idea and how people are educated into doing that. It's a film about how a soul or a human spirit can be coerced and led in a certain direction," Haneke says through a translator during an interview while in town for the New York Film Festival last October. Set in a small bucolic German hamlet in the months before the advent of World War I, the film explores the chasm between the picturesque pastoral village and the brutality, malevolence and abuse bubbling just below the surface. As the film opens, the narrator, the village schoolteacher, recounts a series of inexplicable acts that have been occurring in the village, from the horseback-riding doctor crashing over a trip wire strung between trees to an unfortunate accident that befalls a farmer's wife. Before long, it's clear that someone is behind these increasingly savage deeds. "The starting point was to show a group of children who embody the ideals of their educators and parents, raise those ideals to absolutes and then judge the parents according (to these ideals)," explains the director.

Behind the doors of the village homes, the camera discovers a ruthless, humiliating cycle of domination, repression and guilt exacted by the power-wielding men in town - the icy baron whose frustrated wife leaves him for another man; the steward, who beats his children in a fit of rage; the doctor, who's having an illicit affair with the midwife despite his repulsion for her; and the pious pastor who shames his kids and canes them for their misdeeds. Much of these men's actions stem from their strict, punitive religious views and the sexual repression of the Protestant ethos of the time. The film serves as something of a cautionary tale about the roots of German fascism. It doesn't take much of a leap to imagine that the towheaded, sinister-seeming children - the possible culprits wreaking havoc on the town - will grow up to be young adults complicit in the Nazis' rise to power several decades later.

"Yes, the film is intended as an example to show what conditions have to be in place for children and for people to be turned into potential victims of an ideology," says Haneke. "Depending on the context, that ideology can be right wing, it can be left wing, it can be political or religious. But I took the example of German fascism because it's the most prominent, the best-known example of such an ideology."