White Ribbon

With Michael Haneke picking up his second Palm d’Or at this year’s Cannes, I thought it about time to watch the film which scooped his first Palm, White Ribbon.

Villages are as organic as the people that constitute them, and like everything else that arises from nature, they can succumb to rot. The fictional Protestant village of Eichwald, which provides the setting for Michael Haneke’s 2009 White Ribbon, certainly has something rotten in its foundations. Malevolence taints the place and courses through the folk like an incurable plague. What at first appear to be a series of random ‘accidents’ begins to look more like calculated crimes, of which anyone, and everyone, could be guilty.

This is a film of which the least said the better, so please forgive me if I seem vague. The events narrated in White Ribbon function as a prologue to the First World War, and thus all the monstrosities the 20th century produced. Haneke suggests that Germany/Euroupe/Earth didn’t necessarily become suddenly awful, through the catalyst of war, but rather it always already had been awful, and this isolated Protestant village in Northen Germany acts as a synecdoche of a universal pollution. The plot has the trajectory of a whodunnit, though lacks the denouement, there is no Poirot. The narrator comes close to working it all out, but his conclusions are so repulsive we might be better off without the answer. Ultimately, the viciousness we see is left open-ended, and the war with which the film concludes seems like a logical progression for a story full of brutality, or you could say the war is a thankful relief-- at last this loathsome village will desist from its crimes. I’m now thinking like Grace at the end of Dogville, and what thoughts she must have been turning when she decided that that township must cease to exist.

White Ribbon is a terrific piece of work. It appears on the screen like some antique artefact, a grim anecdote from history that seems thankfully remote in the distant past. It’s naturalism has the atmosphere of truly great work of literature; we never question the events in a Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky novel because the characters on the page seem so real we forget we are reading. The same can be said for the people on screen in Haneke’s White Ribbon, the mis-en-scene, performances, and positively stunning cinematography makes you feel as though you’ve been spirited away to early 20th century Germany, unfortunately it’s a rather horrid place. I leave below a few screenshots from some of the lingering portraits the film exhibits, they rival Sergio Leone’s best work in their uncanny ability to ooze emotion.