Bar none, THE most haunting film I've seen this year.

Rating: 8/10 (28 July 2010)

Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon" is a crude, dark film that haunts you endlessly- and I mean HAUNT in the highest sense of the word. I watched this film last night out of curiosity for the buzz it earned last year at the Golden Globes and the Oscars. As I was watching it I was both enthralled and appalled by how it vividly represented the darkest faults of human behavior, but I failed to consider it a masterpiece (like many other critics are doing). The film was over, I turned the DVD off and was soon asleep. I can't even come close to explaining how much the film haunted my dreams (and still does to this moment); I tossed and turned in my bed all night, my mind thrown into turmoil by the moral implications the film explores and the amount of difficult questions it forces you to face. It's a difficult film to swallow, but it's also a cinematic experience you'll think over for years to come.
The film takes place in a small village in pre-WWI Germany. It is filmed in black and white, and the cinematography is perfect in giving it its aged, depressive feel. The story follows each (or most) of the villagers' lives throughout the year and a number of disturbingly mysterious crimes or 'accidents' that oppress the villagers' peace and in which many of the children seem to be involved. It would be utter madness to try and describe each of the characters, or each of the mysterious 'accidents' that unfold. Suffice it to say that Michael Haneke has managed to give us a thoroughly-nuanced story, and even though it deals with a great number of characters, they're all well-developed and of multi-layered depths; a heaven-gifted screenplay, if I ever saw one. I remember that I kept thinking "This is what M. Night Shyamalan's 'The Village' would have looked like if it had been done flawlessly." It's a suspenseful story because of the mystery behind the 'accidents', but it's actually more of a drama- a deeply-felt, crude but poignant exploration into the human soul and of the simplistic beauty in us all that rivals the beastly evil we all repress. It's about the loss of innocence to a world of war, greed, violence and envy; it's about love, and how such a pure feeling becomes adulterated with the hellish passion for sex; it's about the basest characteristics of humanity, and how they taint the existence of a few people living secluded in their village, quiet witnesses to the horrors around them but unable to act against them.
It's not a simple film, no. And it's not a film to watch on a rainy Monday night, cozily snuggled under your covers. It's a film meant to be taken seriously, to be thoroughly analyzed, to have its every frame dissected and squeezed from its significance. I watched it for mere pleasure and discovered that I was almost bored to yawns: it's two hours long but feels like five, it's incredibly slow-paced, there is no raw emotion meant to be immediately understood (but everything must be interpreted from the characters' faces and tone of voice), every single scene has a definite, non-literal meaning...in short, it's NOT a movie you'll enjoy, but a film you're supposed to analyze and then to treasure for the amazing message it conveys. I went to sleep after watching the film pleased with it but unable to understand how such a... slow, emotionless thing had managed to capture critics' attention so. And then came the sleepless night, where I unconsciously ran over many scenes in my mind, analyzing their meaning and coming up with the horrid, deep and frightening conclusions the film gives us.
Well, actually, it's not like the film itself gives us any conclusions, but it leads us to ask ourselves many questions concerning the abhorrent nature of humans and it points us to the turgid answers we'll be sure to get. It's a film that flawlessly presents beauty and horror as twin brothers who can't leave apart from each other. There's the mystery of the 'accidents' combined with the tragically dysfunctional lives of each villager, with the unfair treatment of the children, with the expressly marked roles of men and women, with the growing ambiance of war around them, with the loss of innocence in the town's children, with the inhibition of sexual discovery in each of them, with the refreshing love story between the narrator and a naïve teenagerwell, the movie imparts cold, direct facts of life, pieces of humanity in all their wonder or horror, and it's up to the audience to make any sense of it all and to come to one's terms with the implications of the film's message.
I think of "The White Ribbon" and I see it being the topic of discussion in cine-circles around the globe and in film classes. It's destined to become a classic because of the sheer amount of things it deals with and the absolute power one manages to uncover while analyzing it. If I were to start analyzing now I'd be giving away spoilers by the second and ruining what will surely be one of the best foreign films you'd ever watch. I can't recommend it enough! Rating: 3 stars and a half out of 4!