It's a hard life

On Saturday we watched Michael Haneke's Das weisse Band: Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte. I had already seen it once before but I was surprised at how much detail I'd missed first time round, for example the subtitle and its orthography are significant. The greatness of the film is actually in the detail and in the refusal to provide a neat explanation of the events that drive the plot. This is what prevents it just being a facile allegory of whatever aspects of later German history you want to project it onto. OK, it is a movie about Germany, but it is more than that. As the great Nanci Griffith puts it:

And if we poison our children with hatred

Then, the hard life is all  that they'll know.