“Beauty has to suffer. That’s what they say,” the doctor muses at one point in The White Ribbon. The coupling of these antithetical poles is a longstanding motif in Austrian director Michael Haneke’s films. His latest is a near-epic tale about the effects of a series of mischievous events on a small German village just prior to World War I. Here, with the introduction of punishment, the purest virtues of family, religion and honest labor ominously breed hateful behavior and anguish.
The narrator, an older version of the school teacher (the protagonist), informs us right up front that the village’s strange events “may cast a new light on some of the goings-on in this country.” He’s looking back on experiences that could appropriately serve as a foreshadowing of the fascist, revenge-seeking enforcers of harsh discipline that would soon become Germany’s flagship diplomatic tool of the 1930s and 1940s.
In the film, foul play gradually besets the hamlet’s repressed inhabitants. Someone is setting an estate on fire, damaging another man’s cabbage crops and molesting and harming helpless children. The film’s unnerving opening shot shows the town doctor riding home on his horse. Suddenly, the horses’ legs snag on a barely visible wire and the man and horse collapse to the ground. The culprit behind these crimes remains faceless. Is it the mistrusting, God-fearing adults or the seemingly innocent children that couldn’t possibly grow up as the next Dennis the Menace, Problem Child or Kevin McCallister?
Haneke’s layered narrative hooks the viewer into the whodunit but offers no easy conclusions about the origin of sin.
The school teacher, a docile, uncouth townsperson generally observant of the sequence of the events, is by far the least strict and imposing of the adult authority figures. Parents punish their children for even the slightest discrepancy, leading to child abuse in the form of 10 strokes of the cane. Boys are tied down when they sleep to prevent “temptation” such as a nocturnal emission.
The White Ribbon inserts several shocking moments amid cold, distancing conversations. The overload of characters clutters the narrative throughout until its ambiguous ending does serve to untangle a few snarled plot threads.
Too rare do the children have the opportunity to fruitfully talk to each other, but when they do, it proves to be most compelling. Siblings precociously pose questions about God and death. “Why would God want you to die?” the schoolteacher asks a troubled boy in an eerie moment. There are also chillingly cold scenes between the adults, such as when the miserable doctor shrewdly calls his mistress, the midwife, repulsively unattractive.
Considering the size of the cast of characters, there are a good many credited by their occupations alone. ‘The baron,’ ‘the school teacher’ and ‘the pastor’s wife’ are temporal adjustments to the Canterbury Tales paradigm.
In his first German-language film since 1997’s Funny Games, Haneke seems to have crafted a anthropological story on a much bigger scale than his last few studies of behavior and punitive action.
The White Ribbon provides a decidedly prophetic look at an obsolete, simple lifestyle that soon evolved into a fascist state. It wavers between fascinating Bergman homage and really dated documentation of psychology experiments shown to a class of drowsy college students.
“The world won’t collapse” is a phrase spoken twice in the film – another creative touch that eagerly puts the film’s concept in a political context and demonstrates Haneke’s erudite role as a film historian for masochists.
7 out of 10