Allegorizing Haneke

Rating: Null/10 (4 November 2009)

"The White Band" explains its title in a scene where the local priest's children, after supposedly having behaved sinfully, wear a band on their arms, as a remembrance of "purity and innocence", until these two virtues are restored.
But they are not. The white band, courtesy of history, that is Duke Ferdinand's assassination and the beginning of the WWI, enters the modern era, whereupon the narrator, the village's teacher, brings his narration to a stop, since, as he puts it, was thrilled by the festive prospective of his marriage to the appropriately named Eve. His voice gives in to the church choir which fills the tableau, the tableau fades, his last words being, "I didn't see any of the villagers again." Why did I choose these two moments? Because they are pivotal in a way; in a way, this is where complexities begin, not in a favorable way.
Even if the film is not wholly allegorical, that is how fascism emerged, as the general view goes, or, more closely to the title of the film, about the loss of innocence, there are allegorical pinpoints, like Eve's name, or again the title, that come as allegorical punctuation. And that should mark a stronger point than a full-blown allegory, because it should make more antithetical our reception of the film - but this does not happen. Why? The dialogues come off tendentiously as an accumulative, oppressive endeavor, as evil's own proof and repression. I, for one, would rather think that the introduction of a certain human detail would make the inhumanity of hierarchy's representatives even more terrible, for even a national traitor has his human moments; otherwise, the thing smacks of a schematic, one-dimensional allusion, or worse of a melodramatic, unintentional bad joke as when the priest is close to tears when his son offers him the replacement for his bird in the cage. But I think, if you allow the extreme reference, this was a bad pun intended towards Hitchcock's lovebirds from "the Birds", for Haneke has certainly has read his Hitchcock well, as most of his recent films show. There are no lovebirds in his films.
And this marks another weakness of the film: the voice off narrative is a device one should avoid, as any pupil of Hitchcock should know, unless one's intention is to frustrate, but I don't see how this is handled in a profitable way in the film since we are offered scenes the narrator could not have witnessed or heard. Of course a director can change registers at will, but - and here comes the second major reference in terms of influence, or if you want dialogue - when that happens, we are somewhat dragged into Bergman's territory, as many a reviewer has pointed, but I find that this lacks cinematic merit, and certainly Bergman's graceful touch. If it is not plausible, make it graceful.
But perhaps you will say lack of grace is the point. And perhaps you are right. But if grace is lacking, and be replaceable by a thorough grayness, then highlights of allegory that come as punctuation only steal both ways. To cut a long story short, you can have an allegory of repression, if repression is meant as police repression of a riot, but if it is psychologically, and more precisely, as surely Mr. Haneke intends, post-Freudian, then you can't have an allegory of it: it either seeps, breaks into the surface, bends and returns, or not. Yet "the white ribbon" remains white throughout. It just fades out in the end. And we do not fade in in our anxiety.
The film remains a good premise where it should have risen up to its promise. Mr. Haneke should stick to the amorous couple's discontents which bring obliquely and eloquently the community's discontents, as he superbly achieved it with "the Pianist". It seems that with a direct approach of the political he becomes literal, and not to the letter.