LITTLE ROCK — People tend to find the movies they want to find, and I don’t have to imagine that there are Arkansans who have been waiting for Michael Haneke’s Oscar-nominated The White Ribbon. People have asked me about it. No doubt it’s been in a lot of Netflix queues since it won three major prizes (including the Palme d’Or) at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Now the film is finally opening in Arkansas, a few weeks ahead of its issuance on DVD. And it falls on me to review the thing, a duty I’m reluctant to embrace wholeheartedly, not least because while I have immense respect bordering on awe at Haneke’s accomplishment, I do not love this film and would recommend it only to audiencesconversant with the funny games in which the director habitually indulges. I’m not saying there isn’t a whiff of Old World masterpiece about The White Ribbon, only that it’s the sort of strident, rigorous work that could be taken - or even meant - as a bitter joke.
It is a movie about a series of inexplicable - maybe senseless - cruelties committed in a fictitious German village called Eichwald in the months before the outbreak of World War I. It is narrated by an elderly schoolteacher (Ernst Jacobi) looking back on the events from a great distance - presumably after World War II.
One summer afternoon, the town doctor (Rainier Bock) is badly hurt in an accident caused by trip wire. Later a farmer’s wife is killed in an accident at the sawmill. Children disappear, then turn up bound and beaten.
The town’s children seem to have knowledge that their elders don’t possess; they gather at the sites of these incidents to stand as mute witnesses. One of them later reacts to her father’s censure by impaling a bird with his scissors. It becomes apparent that the doctor - partially recovered from his fall - hasbeen carrying on abusive relationships with his daughter and his housekeeper, the village midwife.
At a crucial point in the story, the midwife commandeers a bicycle to ride into a nearby larger town, claiming she knows who’s behind these crimes. She disappears with her son, never to be heard from again.
On the one hand, The White Ribbon is wonderful re-creation of a certain kind of old movie - a kind of old movie that Americans would immediately recognize as “foreign” even without the benefit of audio. In this deliberate evocation of antiquestrangeness, it seemed to me like the much more playful work of the eccentric Canadian director Guy Madden, who uses vintage equipment to produce vintage effects. Haneke ironically used a lot of state-of-the-art digital manipulation to create his village - he erased such signifiers of modernity as power lines.
It is also a kind of openended puzzle film, similar in ways to his 2006 Cache (which Martin Scorsese is reportedly remaking for Americans). If you are someone who craves clear resolutions, then The White Ribbon is bound to prove unsatisfying.
But it also intends to be a kind of philosophical inquiry into the nature of evil or, as the director puts it, “terrorism”: These are the children who grew up to be Nazis and “Good Germans,” but the village of Eichwald also evokes the grotesques of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. There is a forensic, matter-offact tone to the film that reads as sober and authentic, even to those of us who suspect Haneke has a heartbeat and a sense of humor.
The White Ribbon
Grade:
90
MovieStyle, Pages 42 on 03/19/2010