The Asphalt Jungle

The White Ribbon (2009)

February 18th, 2010 by Raj Ranade

There’s a creeping dread that permeates Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon”. It’s a spectral terror that manifests itself powerfully through acts of violence but does not lay claim to any identifiable source. It’s one hell of a disturbing feeling, and it’s the kind of emotion that Haneke has become quite skillful at evoking throughout his career.

Like the year’s other infamous European provocateur, Lars von Trier, Haneke is a filmmaker who likes to shock and unsettle his audience, but his methods tend to be eerily different from the traditional cinematic grammar of suspense that has stretched down from Hitchcock to Fincher. Haneke’s films are calm, with long takes and gentle editing patterns, but no less creepy for their stillness – anyone who’s seen Haneke’s “Cache” will remember the jump moment that had the audience screaming, but they’ll also remember how motionless, extended shots took on an eerie foreboding nature thanks to the very conception of the film. Out of the unlikeliest of techniques, Haneke can conjure palpable free-floating fear.

Haneke’s approach is similarly effective in this tale of unusual happenings in a small German town in 1914. “Ribbon” opens with a shot of a doctor being knocked from his horse when the animal is tripped up by a wire. The wire was clearly set as a trap, but who is responsible? More accidents follow: a woman dies at a factory, a child is abducted and beaten, and a barn is set aflame.

Just as unsettling as these incidents, however, is the general climate of social repression that Haneke reveals through the stories of multiple families in the village. A pastor ties his son up at nights to prevent him from masturbation, for example, while a doctor sexually abuses his daughter. A young schoolteacher from another city is seemingly the one decent man in the area - his innocent and pure courting of a local nanny is the film’s only respite from darkness – and his observations of the local children reveal that they might have something to do with the town’s mysterious crimes.

“Ribbon” has its share of detractors, but few doubt the filmmaking mastery that is on display here. Most obvious is the incredible beauty of Christian Berger’s black-and-white cinematography, which mocks the sordid nature of the rest of the film. Shot in film and retouched digitally, the high-contrast imagery is thoroughly stunning – watch how fire in the film flickers in a uniform, brilliant shade of white, in pure opposition to the shades of grey around it.

Less apparent but arguably more impressive is Haneke’s narrative wrangling. Dealing with a cast of dozens of characters, Haneke weaves a tapestry of incident to illustrate the social dynamics of the town in a plot that never seems overstuffed or overwhelming. The performances he gets from that cast are also uniformly impressive, particularly from his youngest actors. The moon-faced young children of the cast are incredibly successful at eliciting both sentiment but also that aforementioned dread. It’s hauntingly sad when the pastor’s daughter breaks down after being castigated for a minor offense, but it’s terrifying when a four-year-old child’s response to learning about the concept of death is a quiet but enraged tantrum, and the film really starts to disturb when the children are revealed to possibly be capable of even worse.

The source of moral corruption in these youths is the main subject that Haneke is exploring here, which is an important subject indeed; in twenty years after the film’s setting, this generation would be the backbone of the Nazi party. The film’s detractors have charged Haneke with historical oversimplification – A.O. Scott scoffed that the film’s point of view is that “Nazism was caused by child abuse” in the New York Times – but I don’t think that’s fair. The obliqueness of the film’s endgame and the unreliability of the film’s narrator are hardly the tools of simplistic message-making. If anything, I think the film’s ideas about the hypocrisy of authoritarianism, the breeding of individual violence through systematic violence, and the collective guilt of societies are overly familiar rather than oversimplified. Those ideas are worth exploring again, in any case. The perils of religiously fanatic cultures are hardly foreign topics to our times.

“The White Ribbon” isn’t the best film to be nominated in the Oscar Foreign Film category this year – Jacques Audiard’s film “A Prophet” is going to blow some minds when released stateside – but it is a film of immense power. Filtering a story of horror through a lens of beauty and the kind of thoroughly classical filmmaking style that Bergman or Dreyer might have used, Haneke has created a film of profound, haunting dissonance that gets under your skin and stays there. The film lingers, just as, in the final shot, the pastor’s white collar lingers while the screen fades to black, a symbol of a false purity that tainted souls and ravaged history.

- Originally published at The Daily Princetonian -

Entry Filed under: Reviews, Film, 2009