the very definition of an "art film"

Rating: 6/10 (9 July 2010)

Movies don't come much more austere or art-house friendly than "The White Ribbon," a German film written and directed by Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke. With its stark black-and-white cinematography and deliberate pacing, the film has the look and feel of an old Ingmar Bergman picture - Ingmar Bergman crossed with M Night Shyamalan, that is, since its story centers around a village in pre-World War I Germany where strange and inexplicable things begin to happen. The town doctor is injured in a mysterious horseback riding mishap; the baron's son is found hanging upside down in a barn; a worker dies in a freak factory accident. All of this is narrated by the town's schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) who falls for a sweet, shy girl who works as a nanny at the manor house.
The children - most of whom look like they just stepped out of "Village of the Damned" - struggle with thoughts of death and the guilt caused by a repressive society, while the adults - an emotionally rigid and unyielding pastor, a cruel, incestuous doctor - contend with their own inner demons, as they groan under the burdens of a class-conscious feudal system and the weight of their own conflicted desires. The theme seems to be that when people bury their natural urges under a crushing mountain of rules and regulations - whether societal or religious in nature - those sublimated urges will manifest themselves in other, demonstrably harmful ways (killing birds, destroying property, kidnapping and torturing children, etc.). The conclusion we're supposed to come to, I guess, is that it was from just such seeds that the war that was to come would eventually spring. I guess.
I wish I could say that I liked "The White Ribbon" better than I do. It's certainly wonderful to look at, and there is something haunting and hypnotic about Haneke's vision of life in a small German village at that particular moment in time. But the plotting is so obscure, the pacing so funereal, and the overall demeanor so heavy-handed and pretentious that, I'm afraid, it takes quite a bit of forbearance and patience just to get through it all.
Still, the mood and the visuals make it worth the effort.