The White Ribbon (2009)

Winner of the Golden Palm Award at Cannes in 2009, and nominated this year for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, The White Ribbon is both quiet and disquieting. It’s a strange film that goes in directions I did not anticipate and provokes thoughts I did not expect. It left me feeling puzzled and a bit unsatisfied, but upon reflection I believe the film is designed to produce a sense of uneasiness. Despite my reservations about it, I can’t stop thinking about the movie, and I want to see it again.

The White Ribbon takes place almost entirely within a small German village called Eichwald. Most of the villagers farm the fields or tend to the needs of the local landowning Baron (Ulrich Tukur), his Baroness wife (Ursina Lardi), and their children. The village pastor (Burghart Klaussner) strictly governs his own houseful of children, sending the entire family to bed without supper when his two oldest kids, Klara (Maria-Victoria Dragus) and Martin (Leonard Proxauf), arrive home late without sufficient explanation. He ritually beats these two children, then makes them each wear a white ribbon until they regain their “innocence” and “trust” from their father/pastor’s perspective.

The village doctor (Rainer Bock), a widower, is raising two children–a 14-year-old daughter and a shy young son–with the assistance of the town midwife (Susanne Lothar), who in turn is looking after her mentally challenged son, Karli (Eddy Grahl). We learn the names of many of the children populating the village, but most of the adult characters are nameless, identified only by their job or position. The children are often witnesses to the strange events depicted in the story; the unspoken but larger question is, are the children participants, or even instigators, in what occurs?

Narrated in the voice of an old man who was once the village’s milquetoast 31-year-old schoolmaster (Christian Friedel), the story born from his admittedly unreliable memory begins with a shocking, mysterious incident that hospitalizes the doctor. A cursory investigation of the crime is diverted almost immediately by another, deadlier incident. As the months pass, more disturbances occur: A farmer commits suicide. A field of the Baron’s cabbage is destroyed. A barn mysteriously catches fire. Two children suffer yet survive vicious physical tortures. The village children, especially Klara and Martin, seem to be nearby when many of these incidents occur. And though these mysteries initially had me thinking this film was a whodunit, writer-director Michael Haneke is not focused on the mystery, but on a larger sociopolitical scale. It becomes apparent that the repressed, cold, and curious nature of the village children reflects the oppressive, secretive, gossipy, and perverse lives of their progenitors in this village. Whatever these children may or may not be up to, the adults are their enablers and protectors.

Darkness pervades this town, both literally (due to the shadowy, natural period lighting and the bleak black-and-white cinematography) and figuratively–the latter best exemplified when the doctor, a heretofore sympathetic character due to his violent accident, quietly unleashes a scathing verbal attack on the midwife that contains some of the most brutally vicious language I’ve ever heard directed at another human being. Along with this sense of darkness is a profound silence. There is no musical score, only a couple of brief moments of incidental music. Haneke emphasizes the unnerving quietude by bookending his film with credits displayed in complete silence, reinforcing the notion that this village is in tacit agreement–or apathy–over the events transpiring around them.

It occurred to me midway through The White Ribbon that it was like a partially finished jigsaw puzzle, where the outer framework has been completed to set the boundaries, and a few contiguous areas within appear to fit together. However, many gaps remain to be filled in by our imagination. A prime example comes with the revelation that the story takes place in 1913-14, in the months just prior to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the resultant beginning of World War I. Though the film never directly references later history, knowledgeable viewers can picture these menacing children twenty years hence, in their twenties and thirties, wearing uniforms, committing atrocities, and forcing people to wear identifying cloth patches not unlike the white ribbons their parents “corrected” them with.

This subtle, deceptive film pays such hypnotic attention to its vintage look and feel that it’s difficult to perceive it as a contemporary film, unless you compare it with other influential cinema classics that preceded it. The cloistered, repressive community is reminiscent of those depicted in the searing Lars von Trier dramas Breaking The Waves and Dogville. More than once, it reminded me of another unusual film of youth in simmering revolt, Lindsay Anderson’s If… (both movies contain a ritualized beating scene). As I was exiting the theater, I was also surprised to overhear a stranger mention another movie memory that the film triggered in both of us: the 1960 British sci-fi classic Village Of The Damned, in which a small town falls under the control of soulless children who look angelic but are unafraid to kill. Considering that film was made during the Cold War, with memories of World War II still fresh in the minds of the British, it could be analyzed as allegory just as The White Ribbon surely can.

Is Haneke’s aim to show how the Nazis grew up? Or is it about the nature of evils both great and small? Could it be, as some have suggested, about the rise of terrorism? Religious extremism of any stripe, regardless of the religion, fosters increasingly shocking acts designed to terrorize others. The White Ribbon will surely generate much discussion and analysis as it reaches a greater audience. It’s an unconventional and discomforting film that confuses-yet-haunts and lingers in the brain. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

(For more Michael Haneke movies, be sure to visit Amazon. If you buy something, we’ll get a small commission fee that helps keep us in business.)