For a filmmaker who has fashioned a career out of dissecting the savage torpor of modern existence, Michael Haneke‘s The White Ribbon comes as something of an oddity. A story of strange occurrences in a tiny German hamlet on the eve of WWI, the film carries with it a bundle of theatrical firsts for the Austrian-born director: first film presented in black and white; first film constructed around a romance; first film done in period. (I’m excusing 1997′s adaptation of Franz Kafka‘s The Castle, as it was made for television (soft leg to stand on, I’ll admit), and was itself anomalous to Haneke’s obsession with more modern afflictions. However, the argument can be made that Haneke is Kafka’s spiritual successor, when the obligations to society and law are synonymous.)
It is a surprise to this viewer that the director carries off these new challenges rather effortlessly. The decision to use black and white has a number of implications and visually connects the film to the pastorals of Ingmar Bergman. Going beyond mere facade, The White Ribbon owes a debt to the philosophical struggles of The Seventh Seal and the narrative construction of Wild Strawberries. One can easily imagine Haneke’s schoolteacher protagonist growing up to become Bergman’s backward-glancing Dr. Isak Borg, and the whole of The White Ribbon‘s mystery falling somewhere between remembrances of a young Bibi Andersson and the reception of an honorary degree. That Haneke’s film was actually shot in color and then desaturated to its present starkness befits the cloistered lives of the characters who populate his little German hamlet, who have had their vivacity chaffed from them by various powers that be. More likely, though, since this technical sleight of hand is only occasionally noticeable in the film itself, the choice of using black and white was made to emphasize the extreme polarity of the world in which the story unfolds. It is the black and white of the feudal system, of lord and land, the black and white of the Protestant church, as hammered down by the village pastor. It is the culmination of generations of rigid ideology that will lead a German people faithfully, thoughtlessly to this story’s ultimate conclusion, twenty-five years beyond the final frame.
Yet somehow within the stockades of this obdurate world, there is space for romance to grow, however furtively. The courtship between the schoolteacher, played by Christian Friedel, and the Baroness’s nanny, Eva, blushingly portrayed by Leonie Benesch, is one of the more touching and genuine relationships I’ve ever come across in a film. That this love, which blooms quietly amid a rash of barn burnings, suicides and ritualistic shamings, was written and directed by the same man responsible for The Piano Teacher is nearly unthinkable. It is only when taken alongside the tragedies composing the film’s central mystery that this relationship assumes the bittersweet tinge familiar to Haneke’s work. As with Juliette Binoche and Thierry Neuvic in the masterful Code Unknown, their embrace is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Still, when stripped of everything else, the swirling image of Eva and the schoolteacher waltzing clumsily at the harvest celebration—eins, zwei, drei, eins, zwei, drei—remains an indelible one, containing both the ballet of Ophuls and the charmed nostalgia of early Truffaut. For narrator and audience alike, it is one of only a handful of moments in The White Ribbon of whose truth we can be certain.
Technically speaking, the film is quite breathless, and might be the crown jewel of any other director’s career. The composition is precise, the period met head on. It is easily the most accessible and palatable of Haneke’s works (please, start here and not with something like Funny Games, lest you be completely put off). It won the Palm d’Or at Cannes last year and was nominated as best foreign-language film at the Academy Awards, and deservedly so. But Michael Haneke, more than most, does not make films to win awards; he would sooner twist a boutonniere through your heart. Michael Haneke makes films to challenge his audience. He has an inimitable knack for finding a raw nerve and latching hold of it for two hours at a time, and when he lets go, an ache you never knew was there before lingers on for days. This is not to say that The White Ribbon is devoid of challenge, that it is easy. Far from it. But I do feel that its crisp veneer, its exaction of time and place, are a detriment to its overall impact.
Since seeing the film in the theater this past winter I’ve wrestled with Haneke’s decision to present his story under such well-worn historical circumstances, and I’ve come to understand it as an attempt at the elemental. Whereas the majority of his films deal with the ways in which we have been alienated from others and ourselves by media (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance), technology (Cache), and patterns of cowed repetition (The Seventh Continent), The White Ribbon tries to move beyond the symptoms to the sickness itself. What that sickness is exactly is difficult to say. In the present film it lies somewhere between idea and ideology, the point at which rationality gives way to fundamentalism. It is the tendency for people in meager moral, spiritual or financial situations to grasp hold of something absolutely as a means of righting themselves. “In the name of a beautiful idea,” Haneke said in a New Yorker article last fall, “you can become a murderer.” Where fortitude flags, ideology bolsters. Nowhere does this seem truer than with the small German community in The White Ribbon. Especially susceptible to this reasoning are the town’s children, whose wide watchful eyes are a common motif, and whose hands, it can be inferred, orchestrate the majority of the film’s violence.
It is with these children, however, that Haneke loses what he is working toward. By rooting his examination of why we do wrong in the generation that would grow into the Third Reich, the universality of what he discovers can be brushed off as a uniquely German problem. Audiences are able to step back from the events of the film, point an obvious finger at nascent Nazism, and walk out of the theater relatively unscathed. This disconnect is only amplified by the strong historical aesthetic. Whether a similar distillation of human nature could have been reached under more modern circumstances remains, like the film itself, a mystery. Perhaps our lives are simply too cluttered in the twenty-first century to exist in high-contrast black and white. But as it stands now, when subtext to an audience is ninety percent context, The White Ribbon exists as a finely chiseled headstone beneath a century of glass: curious, morbid, oddly familiar, but ultimately the designation of someone else’s bones. – [DVD]
Drama/Mystery
Unrated
DVD Release Date: 6/28/10