The White Ribbon/Das weiße Band--Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte has taken Cannes’s Palme d’Or and other Continental awards, been selected at Telluride, Toronto and New York, and created Oscar buzz. Paris-based Michael Haneke so directs from his story and script that, as in his Time of the Wolf and Hidden, mystery is not resolved, letting suspense rest on individuals’ reactions to events not understood or not emotionally accepted.

Immeasurably reinforced by Christian Berger’s sharp b&w camera, in his usual icy detachment Haneke pictures a village of the damned in 1913, where freckled towheads are Aryan candidates for the mantle of many a malicious screen child-gone-to-the-bad-seed because of genes or alien- or satanic-impregnation. If any, or all, of the youngsters are guilty in this case, the determining factor involves an environment of dogma, old-fashioned Old Testament punishment, patriarchal domination of women, and sexual suppression.

Acting and visuals a fitting return to long-ago, WR has been likened to the technique of Carl Theodor Dreyer, though no one has brought up the Freudian parallels to that master’s wartime Day of Wrath. While the Dane exploited symbols of the subconscious, however, Austrian Haneke oversteps with the inadmissible inference that such rural “ideological delusion” gave rise, not only to the Great War on the doorstep, but on to Nazism; our Salem mentality brought about witch-hunts and McCarthy -- but did not threaten all Western civilization.

So un-gëmutlich is the poisoned northern atmosphere that the woman who can leave with her children, does so, for a lover symbolically south of the Italian Alps. However perceptive, disinterested and truthful -- or not -- our guide to what she flees is an underpaid new schoolmaster (Christian Friedel). At thirty-one, he enjoys fishing and amateur music -- the bold absence of a soundtrack is effective -- but his voiceover seems used way too much, for briefer old-time titles would have been appropriate and better.

Quasi-feudal black-clad Eichwald depends on the estate and outbuildings of its pastel-wearing Baron Armin and Baroness Marie-Louise (Ulrich Tukur, Ursina Lardi). Locals persist in addressing the teacher as “sir,” including apple-cheeked seventeen-year-old nanny Eva (Leonie Benesch), recently arrived from near the teacher’s hometown.

Beneath this strudel surface lurks darkness, in isolated mishaps or cruelties that mount up in number and seriousness. Two are caught by the camera and some are inferred, but most remain unexplained, forgotten for good in the furor of anticipated bloodletting following the assassination in Sarajevo.

Looking back from another time and place, the narrator-teacher emphasizes the holes and inaccuracies in his memory, and there are many scenes at which he was not present, but his voice and shy personality lull and convince, and approximation becomes acceptable reality.

The Baron, Baroness and golden son Sigi (Fion Mutert) enter the story, as do the family of the estate steward (Josef Bierbichler) and that of Farmer Felder (Branko Samarovski), recently bereft of wife and mother in a polemical sawmill accident. Developed in greater detail are the town doctor (Rainer Bock) and, the second estate, its pastor (Burghart Klaussner) and his children, particularly the oldest, Klara and Martin (Maria-Victoria Dragus, Leonard Proxauf).

SPOILER ALERT

Initially sympathetic as concerned practitioner, widowed parent and victim of the opening accident that might seem a prank gone wrong, the Doctor is revealed as a cad in his relationship with lonely midwife and mother Mrs. Wagner (Susanne Lothar) and as worse than that with his daughter Anna (Roxane Duran). In white Geneva collar, or band, with white arm-bands and hair-ribbons representing innocent purity, the churchman rules and humiliates his offspring with a cane, bed-ties, tongue lashings, and a determination to stifle curiosity and stirrings of puberty. The response is silent, sullen obedience. Or is it?

In thematic concerns, moral ambiguousness, lack of explanations, and Dreyer-infused methods, Stellet Licht (Silent Light) anticipated WR by two years, but writer-director-producer-editor Carlos Reygadas’ Chihuahua community is recorded in a color that mirrors nature and human warmth beneath the Mennonite-Anabaptist simplicity. With its winter snow, Haneke’s austere European hamlet, in contrast, harbors coldness, resentment and wickedness, so the teacher and his Eva leave. But where in Weimar are they to escape?

(Released by Sony Pictures Classics and rated “R” for disturbing content involving violence and sexuality.)