A journey of tedium

Rating: 1/10 (8 October 2010)

"The White Ribbon" certainly has some good qualities: good production values; great acting; excellent photography; great set pieces & costumes - the film certainly succeeds at evoking a sense of time and place that seems so real and yet so foreign to the modern 21st century audience.
However, these qualities are not enough to save this film from the torturous journey of tedium and humourlessness that it takes the viewer on. It really doesn't matter what the subject of a film is - to succeed, it (almost) always needs one thing at least: a story. You know, things like a beginning, a middle and an ending would be sort of nice. The White Ribbon is lacking in this. This is a collection of vignettes - the pace and editing style is similar to a Jim Jarmusch film (along with the black & white imagery, which Jarmusch tends to use). Unfortunately, it has none of the wit and humour of a Jarmusch film.
In "The White Ribbon" these vignettes take us nowhere. There is no explanation of what is going on in the village. We know something is - different individuals get hurt, assaulted, tortured - but we never learn why or by whom - or for what purpose. This is all intentional, of course - the film maker suggests different possibilities, but also throws at us reasons at is as to why it isn't the very person(s) we might have suspected. (For example, the schoolteacher makes a good case for suspecting the pastor's children - but then we recall that they were sleeping when the fire was set. Was the fire unconnected to everything else that was going on? Could be - who the hell knows though, it's all deliberately ambiguous.) Now, a sense of ambiguity can be effective at times. It can force the audience to think and come to a conclusion of sorts (hopefully one that the film maker had in mind). But when it's so pervasive that you're left with absolutely no idea with what the hell is going on, well, it's just unsatisfying. That this film is deliberately ambiguous is clear. A quick perusal of the topics on this discussion board illustrate that very well, as different people offer their theories on what it all means, and even on who did what. But this film goes too far - one has sat through over two hours of dark, oppressive scenes of psycho-sexual repression with absolutely no payoff. It's not enough to throw out the glib "it explains how Germany embraced fascism". That's too facile, and in any case, who cares - I want a good story, and there is none here.