'White Ribbon' a chilling glimpse of the origins of fascism
Michael Haneke is one of the few directors left in the world who makes "art" films, and they are unapologetically difficult ‘’art’’ films at that. I prefer to call them films you can sink your teeth into.
This one from Austria is set on the eve of World War I in a small fictitious rural village in the heart of north Germany.
What first appears on the surface to be peaceful and serene, is from the opening frames, not. Something strangely evil is afoot, as we are told by the aged voice of the narrator (Ernst Jacobi), speaking about the events from sometime in the distant future.
The man claims to be a schoolteacher in the small hamlet that clings to the ways of a feudal society. A massive landowner/baron (Ulrich Tukur) controls virtually all employment in the town. Other forces of power include the pastor of the Protestant church (Burghart Klaussner), the doctor, and the above-mentioned schoolteacher. Many "peasants" are employed in the fields harvesting the landowner’s crops and working in his local sawmill.
One day while riding back to his house the doctor (Rainer Bock) and his horse are tripped by a taut wire stretched between two trees. Seriously hurt, he spends many days recuperating at a hospital. Who would do such a thing? And why? Other inexplicable horrors occur: a retarded boy is maimed; the wealthy landowner’s son is found beaten and in shock; a barn burns down; and a woman dies when she falls through the floor of the sawmill.
Meanwhile the town’s adult population is meting out its own form of justice to the children. The pastor binds the hands of his adolescent son to stop him from masturbating and he makes his eldest daughter wear a white ribbon in her hair to remind her of purity and "clean" thoughts. Other kids gather at their neighbors’ windows. What are they trying to see or hear? Another is unmercifully beaten by his father for stealing in this close knit community where everyone knows each other.
Like his French language masterpiece from 2005, "Cache," Haneke leaves the questions of "why" up to us.
In that earlier movie, a well-off Parisian couple starts receiving surveillance video tapes of themselves going about their daily lives. They freak out, become paranoid, and one by one the skeletons in their closet begin to rattle.
"White Ribbon" casts a wider net of implication, one that reaches far beyond the limited number of inhabitants depicted here, to include perhaps the entire German state. The film poses an intriguing premise, one that seems to metaphorically predict the rise of Nazism, after you’ve calculated the ages of the children glimpsed here in 1913.
I must say that I felt kind of dirty after seeing the film. As if I and the entire human race was somehow implicated in the strange atrocities laid out by Haneke. It’s all of a piece, screenplay, acting, sets, photography (black and white], nothing unnecessary or out of place. Like the photographs of the great German documentary photographer August Sander (who inspired the look of the film) this is Germany circa 1913. Whether you’ll want to go there, well that one’s up to you. I don’t think I’d be going too far out on a limb in predicting that.
"White Ribbon" will be talked about years, perhaps decades, from now due to its mysteriously unsettling power.