The White Ribbon

City Paper Grade: B

by Sam Adams

WHITE TOWN: Strange, violent occurrences plague a seemingly serene German town in Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon.

[ City Paper Grade: B ]

Dead-eyed provocateur Michael Haneke takes an unlikely turn toward classicism with his Palme d'Or-winning The White Ribbon, an austere, black-and-white drama set in a small German village on the eve of the first World War. The film's visuals lend an air of eerie calm to the disturbing series of attacks that begin to infect the town's serene and self-righteous surface: A wire strung across an open field hobbles a doctor's horse and seriously injures him; a midwife's retarded son is found beaten and nearly blind. It falls to the village schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) — who also narrates the film from an unspecified future point, his voice cracked with age — to try to find some pattern between the apparently unrelated if equally vicious acts. But as is invariably the case in Haneke's oeuvre, violence has no easy explanation, and cannot be traced back to a single source. In Caché, the festering wound was French colonialism; in The White Ribbon it is the obvious onset of fascism, prefigured by the narrator's remark that the story "might explain some things that happened later in my country." Haneke doesn't take the obvious route; there's no scene where a token Jew is chased from the village. But the ideological rigidity and insular logic that allows dehumanizing philosophies to flourish are easily picked out. After committing a heinous act, the son of a domineering priest reasons thusly: I asked God to strike me down, and he did not, so I must not have done anything wrong. Rather than a bulwark against inhumanity, religion becomes the instrument of its rationalization. Not surprisingly, the film gradually focuses in on the younger generation. (Haneke's subtitle, "a children's story," deliberately cuts both ways.) But the shots of identically towheaded children lurking at the edge of the frame take on unintended resonance — unless, that is, the director intended a totalitarian remake of Village of the Damned. In bending toward horror, a genre where the unexplained is commonplace, Haneke's moral fable loses some of its force. The depths of the human soul are more frightening than things that go bump in the night.