Features > Movie Reviews > The White Ribbon…

A series of macabre events rock this still feudal community to its core, but quite who is responsible, and why, remains tantalizingly difficult to pin down.

Taking place over the period of about a year, from the early summer of 1913, The White Ribbon quietly outlines the class hierarchies in the village and introduces four or five characters who will have a significant impact on the story as it develops. A voice-over narration by the schoolmaster gives the movie a novelistic feel, and also puts us on notice that strange things are afoot, not all of which the teacher feels confident in accounting for.

The first mystery is this: who strung a wire between two trees in what seems to have been a deliberate attempt to throw the doctor from his horse? Was it an elaborate prank, or a serious attempt on his life? A widower, the doctor survives, but is sent off to hospital, leaving his housekeeper to look after his two children.

This unsolved mystery is forgotten when a more serious incident transpires: a peasant woman dies in a workplace accident (or is it?). Her grown son blames the local landowner, the baron, for the fatality, and destroys his cabbage field in protest. This compounds the family’s misery however, and corrodes the mistrust between the baron and the farm workers still further.

Yet these unpleasant incidents only give a foretaste of the repellent turn of events that will overtake the village.

Shot in a period-evocative black and white, The White Ribbon is a more classical, old-fashioned film than Michael Haneke (Hidden; The Piano Teacher) is known for – the storytelling is less affected with post-modern tricks and tropes than Joe Wright?s not entirely dissimilar Atonement, for example. It’s also his most expansive film to date, with the widest range of characters and the most leisurely running time (143 minutes).

Still, Haneke-watchers will recognize the elliptical storytelling, the restraint and refusal to pander, as well as the stern, grim view of humanity. It’s an ungenerous vision in which cruelty, exploitation, abuse and revenge cycle across the generations. Compare and contrast Jean Renoir?s great film set on a French estate just prior to WWI, La Regle Du Jeu.

This film is more explicitly grounded in a wider historical consciousness: right from the beginning the narrator postulates that the events may shed some light on the subsequent pathology of his country, and we duly note that the children in the movie will grow up to become citizens of Hitler’s Fatherland. (In Germany, The White Ribbon carries the sour subtitle: “A German Children’s Story”).

It seems a bit glib to suggest that we can explain the Third Reich by the conjunction of religious repression and child abuse in German society, and to be fair, Haneke is never so explicit in stating his thesis. If that’s not what the film is about, though, then I’m a Dutch uncle.

It’s an impressive piece of work all the same, superbly crafted, and engrossing from first to last.