Creates an impeccable sense of time and place

Rating: 10/10 (19 October 2009)

Strange things happen in a small rural village in pre-World War I Germany. The local doctor is thrown from his horse and seriously injured because of a trip wire stretched between two trees; the wife of a farm worker is killed when she falls through a rotted barn door; a young boy is beaten and tied upside down; the son of the Doctor's mistress, a boy with Down syndrome, is blinded in a fierce assault; and the Baron's barn is set on fire. These incidents and others create a climate of fear and suspicion in Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, winner of the coveted Palme D'Or Award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. It is the kind of climate in which a hornet's nest of guilt, repression, and abusive behavior that have been festering in the community for years begins to surface.
Created and written by the director with an assist from award-winning screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, the film is shot in high contrast black and white and narrated by the village schoolteacher (Christian Freidel), the film's most sympathetic character, many years after the events have taken place. Though the film is dark, the courtship between the young teacher and the Baron's nanny, a shy 17-year-old Eva (Leonie Benesch) lightens the mood considerably, almost a necessity in a film that stretches to almost two and a half hours and can be a grim experience.
Although the children are named, the adults are referred to only in terms of the role they play in the village: the Baron, the Pastor, the Farmer, and the Doctor. The most powerful person in the village is the wealthy Baron (Ulrich Tukur) who employs most of the farmers and laborers. His wife (Ursina Lardi) is a woman of culture who looks upon the uneducated people in the village with disdain. It is a patriarchal society in which repressive and puritanical rules are rigidly enforced, everyone knows their place and, if they forget, the club of religion is used to make sure that they remember. In the meantime, acts of cruelty toward women and children are kept secret.
The worst hypocrite is the pastor (Burghart Klaussner) who preaches about God's love but physically punishes his two oldest children Klara (Maria-Victoria Dragus) and Martin (Leonard Proxauf) and humiliates them by tying a white ribbon on them as a symbol of the purity and innocence they should strive for. He even has the boy's hands tied to the side of his bed at night so he won't masturbate. The doctor (Rainer Block) who cares for the villagers by day shames his mistress (Susanne Lothar) at night by means of cruel verbal assaults. As the bizarre incidents pile up, the mystery deepens as to the identity of the perpetrator(s) and even the police are called in but all they can do is to browbeat a young girl who claims to have predicted one of the beatings in a dream.
The White Ribbon stirs up images of the Germany that would emerge years later under Hitler and there is a strong suggestion that the way the children are constantly punished for minor infractions played a role in that development, creating a vicious circle in which the distorted values of the parents are internalized by the children. Reminiscent of the austerity of Carl Dreyer's Ordet, The White Ribbon creates an impeccable sense of time and place, succeeding as an engrossing mystery, an insightful character study, and a cautionary tale that suggests that the roots of war and hatred lie not in ideology but in the corruption of our values and the emptiness in our souls. It is not difficult to see how the Jews in that setting could become scapegoats for that emptiness.