Delicately filmed but pretentious

Rating: 3/10 (8 August 2010)

A pretentious film from the haughty but occasionally interesting Austrian art filmmaker Michael Haneke (Hidden/Cache, for instance, was a fine if unsubtle movie about the profound guilt that westerners should feel for being successful, a common theme from the director). Filmed in a delicate black and white, The White Ribbon takes place in a small German town in the immediate period before World War I. Through a number of mysterious violent acts occurring in the village, Haneke wants to show the hypocrisy of a society rigidly stratified by class. Haneke refuses either to give a clear explanation of these acts (though they turn out to be carried out by children of the community) or to follow a clear narrative line. These make the movie more irritating than surprising (though there always will be snobs that will claim that we are in front of a masterpiece). Some reviewers have claimed the movie to be some sort of metaphor for the birth of National Socialism (with the children supposedly turning into Nazis 25 years later), but there is really nothing here about this. Boring and disappointing.