Das weisse Band (The White Ribbon)

Darkness pervades The White Ribbon. Shot wholly in black-and-white, it feels instantly like a classic from a much earlier era. Simultaneously, the camera both hides and reveals, building unabated tension throughout the film, giving it the distinctive quality of the horror of a Hitchcock and the innocence of a Chaplin. The juxtaposition of a secluded pre-WWI Germanic village and the horrors of the most macabre modern headlines creates a world where the unknown lurks around every corner, engendering fear and inhibiting any semblance of stability or a positive spirit.

In the years leading up to the first World War, a small village in northern Germany experiences a series of mysterious monstrosities, one following on the heels of the other in uncanny severity. The parents are exacting and uncompromising, and the children desire to rebel. A school teacher narrates years after the events, telling us what to expect, and when it happens, we can’t help but feel surprised and appalled. It is the children, though, whose unenviable lives are often at the center of this enigmatic story, who evoke a deluge of empathetic emotions time and time again.

Deep pathos resides in every soul. The people in the village struggle to exist fully when the world around them proscribes it with draconian strictures and moribund phenomena abound. (The following sentence may be a “spoiler.”) The film reads like a classic horror film, though none of the occurrences are ever shown on the screen and the individual(s) responsible never revealed. Several different plot lines are followed, each of them connected by a common thread in the village. Fear perpetuates fear, and the people never fully recover. The world of the village is eventually consumed by an ever present ominous quality, permeating the entire village, from the school to the church to the minds of each and every individual.

Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher) directs The White Ribbon with an eye for the uncanny and an ear for overt naturalism. The film lacks a particular aspect most films wouldn’t dare to leave behind: music. Save for a few instances when the characters themselves play music, we hear little more than the sounds of frustrated speaking, hushed collusion, creaking floorboards, and ambivalent Nature herself. At the end of the nearly two and a half hour film, we haven’t so much noticed the lack of music, because the tone is set so brilliantly by the cinematography and the dialogue, not to mention the acting. The film itself exudes the mood of each scene so deftly as to seem a bit unnatural, almost eery.

With The White Ribbon, Haneke has produced one of the greatest films of the previous decade. The very air the characters breathe is perfected, appearing paradoxically both thick with tension and empty of substance. This instant classic may go down in the annals of film history as, perhaps, one of the greatest films of the century. Only time will tell.

Haneke wields matchless intentionality to build constant friction, create characters rife with inner discontinuity, and tell a story as haunting as it is heartbreaking.  But the heart not only breaks, it also races throughout much of the film, as the fragile uncertainty of the characters’ lives becomes only more and more palpable as the film rolls on. This is storytelling at its best. In fact, The White Ribbon is as close to a perfect film as I’ve seen this year. I suggest that you see it. Immediately.

Rating: 4/4 Stars