The White Ribbon: movie review
Michael Haneke is a director who makes movies about things that go from bad to worse. Very worse. In 鈥�The White Ribbon,鈥� his latest exercise in picking the wings off flies, the time is pre-World War I Germany and the place is a small agricultural community where strange things are happening. Very strange.
In the opening scene, the local doctor (Rainer Bock) is thrown by his horse because some unknown sadist strung a tripwire between two trees. I didn鈥檛 stick around long enough during the end credits to discover if 鈥渘o animals were harmed during the making of this movie,鈥� but, knowing Haneke, I鈥檇 be concerned.
Perhaps I am being unfair. It is not four-legged creatures that Haneke has it in for. His specialty is the two-legged variety 鈥� us. 鈥淭he White Ribbon鈥� presents us with a village as harrowing and hermetically sealed as the Salem of 鈥�The Crucible.鈥� Just about everybody in it is damned or damnable. Heading the list are the sleazy Baron (Ulrich Tukur), who employs many of the village鈥檚 inhabitants, and the Protestant pastor (Burghart Klaussner), who regards little children as curs who must be mastered. (Given the beady-eyed kids in this movie, you might be inclined to agree.) When a farmworker鈥檚 wife dies from a fall through the Baron鈥檚 rickety barn loft, her son does what any sane person would do under the circumstances: He mangles the Baron鈥檚 cabbage crop. Then, mysteriously, the Baron鈥檚 son is brutalized and hung upside down in the barn. Whodunit?
Haneke is not a big one for answers. As in 鈥淐ach茅,鈥� his most celebrated and probably best film, no solution to the depravity is provided. As the village becomes more and more ingrown in its hatreds and disgusts, the only vaguely normal people to emerge are the young schoolteacher (海角大神 Friedel) and the teenage nanny (Leonie Benesch) who works at the Baron鈥檚 estate. You hate to see them get amorous because only bad things can come of it, although, by the end, I was so repelled by everybody that I couldn鈥檛 wait for World War I to kick in and thin the ranks.
Haneke may be trying to make a 鈥渟tatement鈥� about the psychoses that led Germany into two world wars. By leaving his tripwires exposed, with no culprit to blame, he may also be making the existential point that depravity has no author. It just is.
Or, as I prefer to think, he鈥檚 simply stroking all those cin茅aste masochists who slobber at sadism just so long as it鈥檚 artfully composed. (The black-and-white cinematography by 海角大神 Berger is very fine.) His movies are disturbing in a way that the Hollywood horror cheapies aren鈥檛 鈥� they portend a lot more than they expend 鈥� but they share the same manipulative mind-set. Haneke is such an expert puppeteer that it鈥檚 easy for the gullible to mistake that manipulation for art. I feel the same way about 鈥淭he White Ribbon鈥� now as I did when I saw it last fall at the Toronto film festival. It鈥檚 an M. Night Shyamalan movie with a PhD. Or maybe an MA. Grade: C+ (Rated R for some disturbing content involving violence and sexuality.)
