The White Ribbon
aka Das weiße Band
Reviewed in January 2010 / Click Here to Comment
Director: Michael Haneke. Cast: Christian Friedel, Burghart Klaußner, Rainer Bock, Leonie Benesch, Maria-Victoria Dragus, Leonard Proxauf, Roxane Duran, Miljan Chatelain, Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Tukur, Ursina Lardi, Michael Franz, Sebastian Hülk, Kai Matina, Fion Mutert, Birgit Minichmayr, Eddy Grahl, Janina Fautz, Branko Samarovski, Enno Trebs, Josef Bierbichler, Detlev Buck, Anne-Kathrin Gummich, Steffi Kühnert, Gabriela Maria Schmeide, Sarah Schivazappa, voice of Ernst Jacobi. Screenplay: Michael Haneke.

Photo © 2009 X-Filme/Wega Film/Les Films du Losange/Lucky Red;
© 2009 Sony Pictures Classics
After the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man, The White Ribbon offers our second chance in Awards Season '09 to watch a world-class film technician and not-infrequent producer of great movies make a big, awkward lunge for that Entomology Ph.D. he has always wanted. I disliked A Serious Man more than I do The White Ribbon, possibly because the Coens' flippancy seemed just as noxious as their more sober aspirations toward depth and allegory, and there's nothing as off-puttingly poisonous about The White Ribbon as the blatant misogyny of A Serious Man. The White Ribbon feels more convincingly of a piece with itself, but only by comparison, and if it's not as hollowly scabrous as A Serious Man is, you have to credit the Coens for taking more risks. Never for once does their movie feel like one that anyone else could have made, whereas The White Ribbon surveys a lot of thematic ground (German guilt, communal hypocrisy, individual and group perversions, prehistories of fascism) that manages to feel annoyingly homologous with tropes and dynamics of other, more daring Haneke films while also feeling imprecisely oriented around this particular artist's point of view. The film is full of oblique acts of human nastiness, in major and minor scales, any one of which might have been enough to power one of Haneke's surer-footed inquiries into the social and psychic layers of malevolence. Unfortunately, by encompassing so many of them, the film sacrifices a measure of plausibility as well as any fuller sense that Haneke has a particular target he's trying to hit, or a refined idea to explore. He seems to be concocting grotesque incidents (an incestuous affair, a bloody blinding of an autistic child) more from a compulsion to feed his own characteristic reputation for dispassionate dissection of human morbidity than out of credible narrative demand, and the proportions of dramatic payoff feel totally off. The subtler, stranger calamities of a felled horse and a ravaged plot of cabbages have greater visual impact than the more Guignol crimes among the denizens of Eichwald, and more idiomatic specificity: you can feel why these more minor-key events would cause a macabre ripple-effect within this cloistered, severe, pre-WWI community. By contrast, the idea that the local baron's ringleted son could be strung up in a barn and tortured to excess without anyone in the community sharing an inkling of who did it, or why, both stretches the limit of credibility and seems to import the over-weening, almost metaphysical grisliness of a film like Funny Games into a scenario whose driving impetus, given extra stress by its voiceover narrator, seems strongly rooted in a particular time and place. I gave in to my biggest shudder during all 145 minutes of The White Ribbon when a young, fluttering nanny stumbled during her first three-count dance with the unabashedly smitten schoolteacher, which speaks to Haneke's ability to endow even the most mundane events with inordinate tension and power but also to the misguidedness of The White Ribbon's grasping at the straws of over-literalized horror when the frayed nerves all over this hermetic township already give him more than enough material to work with.

If the narrative feels overly congested and all too saturated with a desire to shock, a similar problem of overcrowding manifests itself in the cast, which feels too populated, and which also lacks a convincing sense of these villagers' longtime, entrenched familiarity with one another. As the misdeeds accrue, nothing particular about these citizens sparks any wave of public accusation or private imputation. Instead, a rather dogmatic thesis about Germans being raised to respond to local outrage by keeping their heads firmly in the sand overwhelms any detailed catalog of how, when, or why the townspeople point fingers at each other, or avoid doing so, or keep grudging lists of affronts and likely suspects, or fail to do so, or outright refuse to do so. Again, it isn't that The White Ribbon doesn't sometimes float some intriguing theses or images, but it truncates and confuses its most promising inroads by juxtaposing so many of them against each other, and resorting to broad strokes or smug obliquities when a more sustained investigation would surely have been more eloquent. For instance, one strapping young farmhand's revenge on the local land baron is equally peculiar for the odd mode of attack as for the unusual fact of his undisguised admission of having committed the act, as well as for the muddled, despondent reasoning that prompted him toward this stark but inchoate protest. Unfortunately, having laid the groundwork for this bizarre contestation between lord and underling, triangulated around an offscreen victim (a woman, not coincidentally, in a town and in a movie that relegate women to a fitfully interesting sideline), The White Ribbon is too eager to hop around its canvas of ubiquitous aggressions to uncover any deeper layers beneath this strange, volatile standoff. Meanwhile, whether intentionally or not, the incongruous plotline of puppy romance near the center of the film plays as a sort of embedded, even apologetic ballast for the film's overweening wallow in neurosis and sadism. But that contrapuntal plotting feels too schematic to let the love-plot breathe, and the actors who propel it, especially Leonie Benesch as that errant, eyelash-batting waltzer, pollute their performances with some overplayed expressions of adolescent awkwardness.

Haneke is such a resolutely gifted filmmaker that his scenes make an impression even and sometimes especially when they are quickly overwhelmed by his stern but driftless screenplay or by his lapses in judgment of how much gruesomeness is too much, especially if we admit that a surfeit of "indirect" horror can be just as coarse as being swatted at regular intervals with blood and gristle. Most of the key sequences start better than they finish, and the strongest ones are usually the quickest and quietest. One largely static scene of a small child tip-toeing down a staircase and searching through his own dark house for the comforting figure of his older sister is more evocative in its cavernous, underlit stillness than it is once it reaches the outraged brightness of the scene's conclusion; by the same token, the child's tearful desperation feels more frankly and honestly observed than the seedier and already-obvious scandal that he stumbles upon before getting back to bed. Even more to the movie's credit, there's a midfilm suicide in which Haneke reverses the usual proportions of scenes like these, hustling the scene swiftly into the discovery of the dangling corpse and skipping the usual portentous build-up, and then prolonging the stupefied, unblinking point-of-view shot from the vantage of the survivor-discoverer, instead of cutting swiftly back to his own face. Accented by the simple but evocative sound cues of the farm tools and riding equipment jangling on the door of the shed as it swings open, this shot has the unusual virtue within The White Ribbon of grounding itself in the character's perspective rather than opting for a harsh, rapid cut just as the dead body has been glimpsed, so as to flatter the filmmaker and the audience with a spurious impression of tact or restraint. It's also one of the few moments when the film's grammar stresses how a character within The White Ribbon, rather than Haneke on high in his director's chair, reacts to the quiet parade of sordidness that overwhelmes this village.

For despite their prevalence in the mostly-admiring reviews of the film, there is little that is tactful or restrained about this long disquisition on vague, essentially warmed-over themes, filtered through the narrating perspective of a character who not only appears to know more than he should but who brings little added insight or context to his illustrated recollections—at least, beyond the instantly confessed and no less instantly obvious fact that these memories are incomplete and irresolvably ambiguous. Certainly nothing in his perspective, either within the 1913-14 timeframe or as implied by the retrospective narration, explains the film's ostentatious flaunting of crisp, sleek, high-contrast black-and-white photography, under which regime even the more plodding framings can look elegant, although I must admit that the light never looked especially "period." The monochrome photography prompts a pervasive association with the white ribbons worn by the pastor's children, so as to remind them of their obligations to piety and innocence, but this visual analogy seems disappointingly literal, too, and doesn't seem all that meaningful in relation to the film's frequent, picturesque cutaways to snow-covered trees, bending waves of wheat, or the knife-edged blazes of an arsonist's fire, which have a strong air of serving an aestheticized end in themselves. Haneke is as clear as any filmmaker could be that, as an approach to conscripting moral behavior, the pastor's Scarlet Letter-ish white ribbons are arbitrary, useless, and hypocritical, and yet the self-fetishizing gloss of High Art that The White Ribbon ascribes to itself through look, theme, conception, and duration invites most of the same accusations. It's a shame that the movie delivers so much less than one expects, especially given the impressive production design, some good performances from Requiem's Burghard Klaußner and Haneke regular Susanne Lothar, and the faultless pedigree of the auteur. I wish Haneke hadn't won his long-postponed Palme d'or for one of his emptier efforts, but as more than one Croisette-watcher has opined in the past, even the strongest directors often win the Palme not for their best movie but for the one that feels most solicitous of prizes. B–

Academy Award Nominations:
Best Cinematography: Christian Berger
Best Foreign-Language Film

Golden Globe Nominations and Winners:
✓Best Foreign Language Film

Other Awards:
Cannes Film Festival: Palme d'or (Best Picture); FIPRESCI Prize
New York Film Critics Circle: Best Cinematography (Christian Berger)
Los Angeles Film Critics Association: Best Cinematography (Christian Berger)
National Society of Film Critics: Best Cinematography (Christian Berger)
European Film Awards: Best Picture; Best Director; Best Screenplay
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