Precious is a new-style weepie but one that is much more bracing than depressing
Precious
Theatre
Ian McKellen is captivating throughout. He delights in the play’s gallows humour, yet is also maudlin and poignant
Waiting for Godot
Theatre
Slight quibbles notwithstanding, this will set the West End’s stock riding high
Enron
Utterly, utterly brilliant. You really are in for a treat
Though 'Trilogy' has won rave reviews, I personally found myself exasperated after about an hour
We went on a quiet sunday evening and the food was excellent, but the experience let down by the service and ambiance
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Trapped by tradition: Thibault Sérié as Gustav, one of the children in a strictly Lutheran village
A bit of understanding about Germany's strange social, cultural and political history explains a lot about Austrian director Michael Haneke's Cannes Palme d'Or winner, a chilling tale of strange happenings in a German village on the cusp of the First World War.
Significantly, it is subtitled A German Children's Story and is substantially about repression, hypocrisy, guilt and the way the sins of adults are visited upon the young.
The narrator is the local schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), a decent man who in the end also succumbs to the malaise that seems to affect everyone: at first the village seems a quiet, happy, God-fearing place.
But things begin to happen that up-end all the villagers' Lutheran certainties.
The doctor's horse is mysteriously felled by a trip wire.
A woman is killed when the floor of the sawmill in which she works collapses. An entire vegetable crop is destroyed by someone with a scythe.
The beloved pet of the pastor is killed, the newborn baby of the baron is frozen by a deliberately opened window and the baron's barn is burnt down.
Meanwhile, the teacher is too distracted by the baron's governess to be of much use solving the mystery, but he finally opines that the villagers "could perhaps clarify some things that happened in this country".
The White Ribbon is brilliantly mounted in black and white and superbly acted by a non-starry cast.
It has a cumulative effect that is as strong and memorable as anything Haneke has previously accomplished, an austere and fastidious masterpiece that digs deep into what remains of the souls of the children and adults without appearing to strain for significance.
Who planned and carried out all the "accidents"? We never really know - just as we are left to guess who sent the incriminating videos to the middle-class couple in Hidden. The point of the film is elsewhere. You will find it difficult to forget.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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