This endlessly bleak picture is somewhat intriguing but also overlong, slow and emotionally uninvolved

Rating: 6/10 (23 May 2010)

In a German village, prior to the start of the First World War, strange things are happening. A doctor riding his horse back home is tripped by a deliberately placed wire and a farmer's wife is discovered to have died in an accident without anyone else seeing it occur. Later, the son of the town Baron is discovered tied up and beaten. With each of these incidents, tensions begin to rise throughout the village. Narrating this story is an unnamed school teacher (Christian Friedel) who becomes romantically involved with a much younger woman from another town. Meanwhile, the parents of the village are finding it increasingly difficult to discipline their children, who have begun to continuously misbehave, leaving them as the youngest suspects for some of these occurrences.
Director Michael Haneke rarely provides any easy answers for his films. Cache (2005) smothered audiences with a subtle but claustrophobic sense of menace, never clearly stating the true motivations of the film's unseen stalkers. What made Cache so intense was its tight focus on a single family and for the audience to be drawn into their emotions. Yet The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte) has been crafted to deliberately isolate the audience from this village. As everyone is a suspect, there can be no emotional attachments. Shot entirely in black and white and decorated with impeccable costumes and set designs, the film is strikingly beautiful but also cold and distancing. Though all of the characters are convincingly portrayed by the members of the cast, they are either so deeply flawed or outright nasty that it is difficult to access them and feel for them. In one scene, a doctor tells his mistress that she is not only old, flabby and smelly, but that she should die as well. At nearly two and a half hours, this endlessly bleak picture is somewhat intriguing but also overlong, slow and emotionally uninvolved.
A scarce number of disturbing images are left to shock the audiences throughout a film that relies far more on reaction rather than simply action. Almost all of the incidents take place off screen, away from the eyes of both the characters and the audience. This notion of implying, rather than simply stating, forms a deeper thematic concern for Haneke. At the beginning of the film, the teacher who narrates the story mentions that this tale will explain things are going to occur later in history. Many critics have therefore interpreted the film as an allegory for the young generation of German children, who would escape suppression and grow up to embrace fascism before the start of the Second World War. To further illustrate this point, Haneke has seen the need to leave these crimes unresolved to demonstrate not only how these children were left undisciplined and unpunished but how the mere mention of their responsibility was entirely disregarded. Those that are willing to accept the film's deliberate sluggish pace and its lack of conclusions might find the subtext to be more rewarding and they might be more accepting of Haneke's motivates and choices as a filmmaker as well.
The White Ribbon is not easy viewing and it will hold its own strengthens and weaknesses depending on what some viewers are anticipating. Those that are more appreciative of the period piece genre will admire the sheer craftsmanship of the picture and are likely to be less deterred by the pace and more understanding of what is implied rather than simply spoken. Yet for many, not just those who are expecting a more conventional mystery, it will remain a completely isolating and ambiguous picture that deliberately distances one through its aesthetics and the characterisation of a number of the roles.