A portrait of collective evil

Rating: 9/10 (7 October 2009)

'In The White Ribbon,' the masterful film that won Michael Haneke the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, the Bavarian-born, Austrian-raised writer-director turns to a period costume drama shot in black and white. He focuses on the year leading up to the outbreak of WWI in a fictitious village called Eichwald in the northern, Protestant part of Germany where the local baron (Ulrich Tukur) employs half the population. It's a time and place where people were unusually evil: Haneke has said something like that about his setting. The story is riveting and its presentation is brilliant -- performances that are memorable and vivid; settings that are authentic-feeling; images that linger in the mind. The effect is chilling and though-provoking.
There is a series of malicious and cruel acts. A trip-wire causes the town doctor's horse to be crippled and the doctor (Rainer Bock) is hospitalized. The baron's little boy Sigi is found tied upside down in a barn, beaten and terrorized; the Down's syndrome child of the midwife is attacked and blinded. There are efforts to chase down the culprit or culprits and at one point the schoolteacher, who narrates the film, speaking long afterward, thinks he has figured it out. But typically for Haneke, as in his widely seen 'Hidden'/'Caché' (2005), it all remains a mystery. If this is a police procedural -- and county police are called in finally to investigate -- it's one that fizzles out. The focus isn't just on criminal acts so much as meanness, such as the protestant minister's harshness toward his own children (whom he torments both physically and psychologically for minor misdeeds); or the farmer's grown son who ruins the baron's cabbage patch during the autumn celebration because he blames the baron for his mother's death in a barn accident, or the doctor's verbal abuse toward his secretary, assistant, and sometime lover. Or even what the baron's wife (Ursina Lardi) says to her husband: "I can't live in an atmosphere of malice, envy, cruelty and brutality." For the misfortunes and misdeeds there is much blame, and little forgiveness.
There is a slight sense that this is some kind of artful horror movie about evil children, like 'Village of the Damned.' Particularly in the verbal harshness between couples, the film sometimes seems to go a little too far. Haneke doesn't give you a good time. Whether he's speaking of a suicidal family ('The Seventh Continent'), marauding killer youths ('Funny Games'), modern disconnectedness ('Code Unknown'), a sado-masochistic music teacher ('La Pianiste'), a world of lawlessness and chaos ('The Hour of the Wolf'), a paranoid bourgeois couple ('Caché'), there's a kind of severity and grimness about Haneke's world that, if it works for you, becomes tonic, worth the discomfort. But can we bear the thought that there can be so much nastiness in one little village? Can the elders' (and particularly the minister's) relentless morality cause the children to be more than anything filled with malice? This is why the 'Variety' reviewer justifiably says 'The White Ribbon' "proves a difficult film to entirely embrace." But the way Haneke complexly weaves his spell and creates his village society out of dozens of little details is difficult not to admire. Reportedly, the German is full of flowery touches that evoke the period. Few films convey so vivid a sense of a late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century world-view and lifestyle.
The redeeming vision it that of the schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), a shy, plodding, decent fellow, and Eva (Leonie Benesch) the 17-year-old girl who comes from another town to mind the baron's young twins, who catches the teacher's eye and whom he wants to make his bride -- she too, disarmingly decent and sweet. Haneke is as good at making this couple endearing and touching as he is at making the other adults peevish or indifferent or cruel. And that helps quite a lot. As an older man the schoolteacher is the narrator (Ernst Jacobi), and his humane vision and decent voice provide a perspective on the collective evil that seems to dominate events in this unfortunate year.
'The White Ribbon' has an cumulative, episodic structure. One thing happens after another. Things reach a high pitch when the midwife borrows the bicycle the schoolteacher has borrowed, saying she's found out who hurt her son and is going to report it to the police, and then is never seen again. In the end, the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand changes everything, and at the church the town community recognizes that. The narrator explains that he went to war and when he came back moved to another town and never saw the villagers again.
Haneke is extraordinarily good at making his little Eichwald come to life, showing its central square in snow and summer and autumn, planting the facades of the baron's mansion as firmly in our minds as the doctor's bourgeois brick pile, showing us rooms packed with children whom a harsh father can banish with a word. He brings the church to vivid life and every face in it seems right. The children stand naturally in their old-fashioned clothes and their homemade nightgowns and in their faces we feel their emotional pain. If the lines are drawn harshly, they're also drawn lovingly. And this is another redeeming feature.
Is this the world from which Nazism comes? Not exactly, but 'White Ribbon' shows the ugly element in the German character. But while Germans may read the film that way, it's meant to show fundamental human traits, and in particular -- the pastor is the dominant figure -- how an unrelentingly cruel and judgmental viewpoint can lead to radicalism and violence.
Shown at the New York Film Festival 2009. In an article about and appreciation of Haneke in 'The New Yorker,' Anthony Lane describes 'Das weiße Band' as the director's "most accessible," and "best" film; it's definitely his longest (145 minutes) and richest in incident.