By Dan Cohen, Santa Monica Reporter
NOTE: The following article discusses themes and events in one of the five foreign language films nominated for this year’s Academy Award. While the film is not plot dependent, and nothing is revealed that would compromise the experience of seeing it, readers should be advised that this review focuses on several talking points that have made it so controversial.
“A German children’s film,” the subtitle of Micheal Haneke’s prize winning “The White Ribbon,” barely hints at the way this film engages its principal subjects. But it points us in a certain direction, and may help us to divine the writer/director’s intentions from its earliest passages, making it a lot easier to follow as it gets more complicated. In any case, this is not to be mistaken as a film for children.
Full disclosure; I arrived a moment or two after the opening titles, completely unprepared for the flood of blazing black and white images, which had the effect of a plunge into an icy stream. And though I’d read about the movies’ win at Cannes, and had a fair idea of the what it was up to, I didn’t anticipate the other worldly ambiance, every bit as startling, in its own way, as “Avatar.”
A small town in rural Germany, 1913. A farming community, generally controlled by its wealthiest landowner and his consorts, a pastor and a doctor, is slowly shaken by a series of inexplicably violent events that arrive without rhyme or reason.
The first few incidents, random and puzzling, are taken into account and absorbed, as if they were accidents. But as time goes by, and they accumulate, it becomes increasingly apparent that the perpetrators are united by an inarticulate but potent rage and that that they will not be stopped. When one member of the community points to the children, he’s identified as a pariah and sent packing.
The story isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. Writer/director Haneke takes his time developing various crosscurrents, providing ample details on the relationship of its people to each other, and almost as important, the land itself. While life is an ongoing challenge, there’s a shared sense of purpose, in spite of the inequities of a nearly feudal social structure. That is, until the town is challenged from within.
Although it lacks a central protagonist, the story is initially narrated by a young school teacher, who, in dealing with the children as a group, becomes the first to sense their restless energy. Eventually the teacher takes a back seat to an omniscient point of view. We see things he couldn’t possibly know about, like a hellish exchange between an unhappy married couple, and the humiliation visited on a well meaning female servant. Since he’s just one of many players it doesn’t compromise the films coherence or power. And while the events are mysterious, this is not a mystery, so little is at stake when the all seeing director abandons the single vantage point.
The script is anything but linear. As he assays the community, Haneke brings us cheek to jowl with an exhaustive catalog of everyday life, from a love affair governed by the strict protocol of the times, to the ripple effect of a fatal accident on a family of field workers. The half dozen stories, which move at the same clip, establish a steady rhythm, which is gradually disrupted by the behavior that defies the best efforts to deny it.
The “white” ribbon of the title refers to an honor bestowed on young people for purity of behavior. Early on the pastor lectures his large brood about the importance of aspiring to the godliness mandated by their belief system. This, at the same time he unsparingly punishes his oldest son for masturbating. We see similar parent to child cruelty as it’s manifested in other families, which sets the stage for a wave of inarticulate rage.
There’s more than a hint of Freud in all this. The aforementioned adolescent is manacled at bedtime . A callous father insists on confining his daughter after a young man proposes to her. Children are held to absurdly strict standards of behavior. The children band together to strike back. But Haneke doesn’t stop there. He shows them terrorizing their peers just as readily as their parents.
When the film first played in Europe there was speculation about the significance of the stories’ time and place. Some took it as an exegesis on the fascist impulse that saw its full expression in the birth to the Third Reich. Others saw Haneke’s intentions as more universal and only coincidentally linked to Nazism.
My view is that he wants to have it both ways. There’s no getting away from the specifics of the period; “The White Ribbon” concludes with the announcement of the assassination that started World War I, the fallout of which set the stage for Hitler’s rise to power. But Germany’s failed economy and the resulting social inequity, (a subsidiary concern in the movie) played a more pervasive role than the simmering evil that haunts the characters here. Haneke seems just as intent on identifying a general heart of darkness as its specific time and place. Still he’s taken full advantage of a moment that moves inexorably toward Nazi Germany.
There isn’t a single overwrought moment in the movie’s nearly two and a half hour running time. The power of the film is in the matter of fact delivery of the most candid details. Nothing is underlined. But even quiet segments are rich with feeling. Among the several that grabbed me: a sequence where a little boy, whose father is recovering from a serious accident, queries his young nanny about the nature of death. The child’s attitude is so guileless it leaves the nanny at a loss to respond.
Another scene, where a boy endangers his life at the urging of a friend, is captured with such dark beauty it almost stops the flow of events.
A great deal of credit goes to cinematographer Christian Berger, who’s already taken several European awards for his luminous black and white images. Berger frames and lights the children with knowing precision. At times his camera seems to pear directly into their souls.
Haneke has a well earned a reputation for his pitiless depictions of human failing. Some have called him a misanthrope. I found the psychological torture of “Funny Games,” (which he made twice, originally in German, then years later, in English,) singularly repellent. But at the same time I couldn’t fault its intentions.
I had similar problems with “The Pianist,” which caused a considerable stir when it came out in 2001, largely due to the way it portrayed a sadomasochistic music teacher, who, from time to time, expressed self loathing by “cutting” herself. I saw it with a standing room only crowd at a large festival. After the first scene of self mutilation there was no problem with seating; half the young women walked out. As for the movie, in spite of its deadly earnest, it came off as both hysterical and pretentious.
“The Hidden,” (“Cache” in Europe) a low key drama about the surveillance of a middle class Parisian couple, doesn’t press any hot buttons, but is far more interesting and complex. Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche play two people with a troubled past in this award winner from2005. It’s a good introduction to themes that Haneke takes up again and again. Like the rest of his theatrical features, it’s available on DVD.
“The White Ribbon” works because it presents characters without pretention or presumption. Each one seems motivated from within. The movie has been cast the same way. The people, and especially the peasants, have faces as weathered as their clothing.
This is the sort of challenging movie whose absence of convention will frustrate some to the point of complete rejection, and keep others asking important questions for quite some time.
