SLIFF 2014: The Dark Valley

Title: The Dark Valley

Country: Austria

Score: 8

                Black-clad figures on horseback silhouetted against alpine snow. A taciturn stranger, calling himself Greider, arrives in a remote Austrian village that squirms restlessly under the thumbs of the six brutish Brenner boys. Greider is here, so it seems, to take some photographs. His camera, like a Winchester repeater that he stows in secret, is a novelty on this frozen fringe. But Greider’s real purpose, sealed away inside but almost oozing from his eyes, is revenge. Some men are going to die.

                The Dark Valley is a western that would drip with atmosphere if it wasn’t too cold for dripping. It has an immediate lived-in look and feel, albeit a time and place we wouldn’t want to live in, look at or touch. None of the timber is machine sawn. The dark, heavy and dirty clothes are hand-made and utilitarian. The snow isn’t fake; the actors (led by a mesmerizing Sam Riley) are clearly freezing their asses off.

This is a film of raw elements: water, wood, stone. Man, horse, gun. Even the characters are stripped to their essence, sans psychological complexity or explicit dialog. There are some florid touches in the edgy soundtrack and the arguably injudicious use of slow-motion, but mostly the film succeeds on its lean ferocity.

The first half of Dark Valley is a patient exercise in mounting tension. Then the tension is released, in an inevitably violent bloodbath. There is a scene where the villagers are sending fresh lumber down the mountain, after the first snow has caked the flumes with ice that has a palpable sense of cold and danger and death. The shotgun blasts and swinging fists of the climax, well-choreographed as they are, just don’t have the same subtlety. But another might just as easily feel the other way around. This is a film with a lot to like in it and a must-see for fans of revisionist westerns.

Film Atlas (Austria): The White Ribbon

Country: Austria

Film: The White Ribbon / Das Weisse Band, Eine Deutsche Kindergerschichte (2009)

Set in a small rural village a spring before the outbreak of WWI, The White Ribbon is a sly, creepy black-and-white thriller about power, its abuse, and the hatred it reaps. The peasant farmers, servants and children of the town live in obedience and fear, literally ruled over by the landowner baron, Protestant pastor and small-time doctor who provide the region's economic, moral and intellectual authority. The pastor, especially, is strict to the point of cruelty, sparing least his own children. He uses white ribbons, sometimes literally binding them, as a symbol of the purity and innocence that they must always adhere to. But under the suffocating social hierarchy a monstrous rage is seething, never seen full-on, but glimpsed in the series of mysterious local crimes and in the eyes of the oppressed, hinting at a fulminating reaction, a vengeful corrosion, even within the 'pure and innocent.'

Director Michael Haneke has a reputation as a provocateur, reliably plunging into the darkest corners of human behavior to create disturbing, unpleasant nightmare scenarios. This film, like many of his previous ones, explores the nature of evil, but The White Ribbon distinguishes itself by clothing its modernity in mannered period trappings, eschewing clear cathartic conclusions and keeping its inner workings shrouded in beguiling layers of secrecy, forcing the viewer to approach its meaning indirectly and asking them to dwell on the questions that hang in the periphery; questions of power and victimhood, morality and hypocrisy. Many of the strange events that occur are terrible enough in themselves, but more important are the undercurrents, implications and legacies.

Though Haneke's cold dispassion is often alienating, he differs from other horror extremists (and make no mistake, this is a horror film albeit unconventional) in that he has thought long and hard about every detail of his works and wants you thinking also. In the darkness and ambiguity of his films are messages that are challenging and urgent even if, at time, they are almost unpalatable. For all that The White Ribbon is also a beautiful work marked by stunning, pristine cinematography. Its grace notes of wind rustling across ripening grain or a brook trickling through a dappled forest remind us of picturesque fairy tales and, likewise, only intensifies our nervous dread as we wait for the wolf or the witch or the troll to show itself. But Haneke knows better than to tip his hand.

My Favorites:

The White Ribbon

Museum Hours

Revanche

The Last Bridge

The Counterfeiters

Maskerade (1934)

Angst

Major Directors:
Michael Haneke