THE WHITE RIBBON: The Essence of the Evil (by Vitor Angelo; transl. Sueli F. Lima)

Rating: 10/10 (12 March 2010)

Disturbing! Not because of the amount of blood (there is none), nor the scorn (there is none), nor the shocking images (there are none). But, you feel the film running around your head, your bones and your muscles even after hours, days have passed...
How to film evil? Not that "soapopularish" evil of reality shows, not that evil of the Manichean struggle against good, not that evil we see in others, but the evil that is within us all. This is what goes on in "The White Ribbon", by Michael Haneke, a profound example of how to shoot the essence of the evil.
To this end, the Austrian director uses a fundamental archetype - the purity of children - to dismantle it and slaughter it into frames. The image of the angelic child, which still inhabits the Western imagination, even though we have been made aware of Freud's theories for nearly a century, is gradually disassembled. Representations such as these of the purity of children or the ruling adult male – regardless the resistance of the minorities – are able to impose themselves when Reason takes a nap.
In the film, in a subtle matter, the children are the architects and pursuers of plans against the different - but their role are not explicit, thus watching their unveiling process is very disturbing. You know they are the masterminds all the time without any evidence, without being able to blame on them. Their alibi of purity blinds us the same way we are blinded by the whiteness of the snow.
Everything that is different and outside the normative rules of that small community are basically wiped out: whether it is the dysfunctional family of the physician of the village (the moral question), the midwife and her mentally handicapped son (the physical/ethnic issue), and the gap between the poor peasant family and the aristocracy of the village (the economic question). Many critics see this triptych - as the allegory of the Nazi consolidation which will emerge two decades later. I believe it is a valid vision, despite its shallowness.
The question is beyond the chronological sequence of historical events. The essential inconvenience of the movie is in the pact made with the evil that lies within us all. When we silence ourselves in the presence of evil, when we deceive ourselves and distort the facts to avoid facing evil, when our vice is our passivity, or worse, our denial in face of horrific events so we can keep an unambiguous conscience, or, still, when we prefer taking the easier path of believing that it is all good. At this point we are all evil.
(TEXT WRITTEN UNDER THE VIGILANCE OF REASON)