Critique of Impure Reasons...

Rating: 9/10 (25 January 2018)

Michael Haneke "White Ribbon", Golden Palm winner of Cannes Festival in 2009, takes place in a small German village one year before World War I. The mention of the war sounds like the kind of elements that foreshadows some role the major conflict would play, but if it's any spoiler, I'll say that war has nothing to do with the story and if you expect the kind of movie to provide hints or signals, you'll be disappointed... first and mesmerized after. This is an extraordinary journey in an atmosphere of nauseating and sickening suspicion without any resolution whatsoever.
And the warning is necessary because if there's ever a genre to classify the film, it is Mystery. The word should even be used in the plural form as it features many incidents that punctuate the daily routine of the village, from a prank leading to a fall from horse, to a fire, from cabbage decapitation to child molestations, it is bizarre that all these deeds are strung together but that's because the movie brilliantly reflects the fullest range of human malevolence and that we never know who's committed each act is more disturbing than the acts themselves.
Haneke fears violence like the next decent man but he fears it so much, he feels the need to anticipate it, to expose its in frontal nudity to better conceal its reversely sacred status, he's not a glorifier of human violence but an iconoclast. Whereas Hollywood is often timid when it comes to display real-life violence, using over-the-top depictions to better make up for their falseness, Haneke dares to show a dead body being toileted or the bloody face of a child who's just been molested, with macabre details revealed. It is ugly but it does justice to the moral fight against violence to show 'the enemy'.
Violence isn't just physical, it is also verbal and sometimes with more devastating effects. There's a scene where a doctor confronts his nurse and what comes from his mouth is a flood of verbal bullying that would lure any fragile soul into suicidal candidacy. The man who speaks is the one who fell from the horse in the opening scene, when the animal's legs were stopped by an invisible cable tied between two trees. He's the first victim, but he' as capable as being pitilessly cruel as the monster who pranked him.
The film is shot in black and white, but this is not just an artistic license, the early century was old enough to be captured in monochrome, whether cold photographs or silent archives and recent enough not to be depicted in bright painterly colors, it was indeed a time in black and white. But that look precisely invites us to focus on greyish parts, the shadows, what lies behind the curtains of respectability or that dusts off the ashes of evil. Because this is what the white ribbon symbolizes, not the so-called purity but the pretension to achieve it.
The film circles around the lives of many villagers, from various ranks and backgrounds at a time where people were mostly defined by their jobs, a baron, a priest, a farmer, the doctor, the teacher, and every one of them tries to maintain a façade of dignity. In an intense scene, a priest delivers a long monologue to his elder children after they've come late home... this is a clear reflection of the kind of puritan mentalities that forged some artistic geniuses like Ingmar Bergman, the use of repression or symbols to conceal the demons. But Haneke is as explicit when it comes to show how laborious these rituals are as to demonstrate their uselessness.
This is a village where moral and social conveniences end up poisoning relationships, aa farmer's wife dies because of a work accident but the husband can't complain because he knows it's a lost cause, the baron is the employer and you can't cut the hand that feeds you. A young optimistic teacher tries to seduce the baron's nurse but fails to convince her father to marry him, the priest's son prays God for killing him because he did something wrong, what he did we never know. Still, enumerating all the episodes would be futile and meaningless compared to the main experience.
The real achievement is to create a journey where we can sense the presence of two forces, evil and guilt, but with cloud of uncertainty making impossible to associate them with the perpetrators, only the victims, and even then, there's a crucial point Haneke makes is that victimhood doesn't make you an innocent person. In the context of today, where there's a clear gap between victims and predators, you'd have serious troubles if you even dare to say that, but this is why German cinema is so cold and detached, it respects our intelligence enough not to take side, or flatter our moral conscience, it invites us to reconsider our certitudes.
"The White Ribbon" isn't an intellectual exercise, it's a film about people, men, women and children, caught in a sort of hellish spiral they don't know about. Trying to associate this pattern of violence with the rise of Nazism would be too tempting and reducing, because evil has no boundaries, we all carry it, we all have reasons to fear it as much as to commit it. What Haneke does is depicting violence to deprive it from any kind of taboo value, and by refusing to provide hints or answers, he makes both everyone guilty and everyone innocent, and you've got to figure out which option is the worst.
We all have our 'white ribbons' our limits, and in the absolute no one would over cause harm to anyone, but these things happen, and just because they are irrational doesn't make them immune to a form of rationality, this is the country of Kant that established that for each cause there's an effect and inversely, and one effect becoming a cause, and maybe that's the perpetual movement of history captured in this microcosm of humanity