Jeff Beck Reviews: The White Ribbon
Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” is a film that has already had a lot of buzz about it ever since it won the Golden Palm (the equivalent of Best Picture) at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Now that it’s gotten a limited release it has gathered more positive reviews from critics and even a couple of Oscar nominations for Best Cinematography and Best Foreign Language Film, but is it worthy of the buzz it’s been receiving?
The story begins with a schoolteacher (voice of Ernst Jacobi) recalling events in a small German village in the years before World War I. Strange events happened in this village around this time starting with a mysterious wire that trips a doctor’s (Rainer Bock) horse, causing him to be thrown off and injured. We learn of typical village life through the people we meet. Half of the village is employed by a baron (Ulrich Tukur) who is blamed for the death of one of his worker’s. The worker’s family includes a farmer (Branko Samarovski) and his many children.
We see the schoolteacher as a young man (Christian Friedel) as he courts a young woman named Eva (Leonie Benesch), who is the nanny for the baron’s children. Other strange events include the beating of two children, the first being one of the baron’s, Sigi (Fion Mutert), and the other being a mentally handicapped child named Karli (Eddy Grahl). No one is sure why these events are happening or who is responsible, causing some speculation, but no concrete answers.
When “The White Ribbon” was over, I found myself quite torn over what to make of it. It’s a somewhat intriguing film though the characters themselves aren’t particularly interesting. Haneke seemed to be introducing more characters than he knew what to do with, yet the film still has a strange hypnotic hold as you watch it. This was the feeling I could not quite dismiss.
Was it boring? Not really. I found myself wanting to know more about what was going on with these characters and why these terrible events were taking place in their seemingly innocent little village. The mystery is one of its sustaining features as it keeps you guessing as to who would do such things to these people.
The film feels like a loose collection of conversations, many of which don’t really seem to have much to do with each other. However, many of them do seem like they point towards humans having a dark nature, which is a recurring theme throughout the film. In fact, you’ll notice as you watch the film that it is working on two different levels.
The first level is the everyday life of these villagers as they go about their normal business and professions. The second level is everything beneath that, the darker side of their natures. That ends up being another intriguing part of the film as we watch these characters operate on these two different levels.
It’s been interesting to read several different theories as to who is responsible for the distressing events. There is some speculation at the end of the film given to us by the narrator, but even those “solutions” have some holes in them that don’t really make sense. Some of the evidence points towards the kids being behind it, but most of that is circumstantial. I, of course, have my own theory, which I won’t go into detail about, but just remember what I mentioned of the two-level operation of the film.
Earlier, I mentioned that this film received an Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography, which is certainly well-deserved. Haneke’s camera is incredibly graceful with what he shows us. His camera is not overly-dynamic, but mostly static, only moving very smoothly when it has too, as if we’re one of the villagers watching the events unfold.
After reflecting on the film awhile, I found that I had been drawn into its beauty and its mystery too much to not give it at least a slight recommendation. Many viewers will be reminded of a previous Haneke work, “Caché,” another film that presents a strange mystery but which doesn’t really have one solution either. There’s one thing to be said for these films of Haneke’s, they certainly are good at generating discussion.
3/4 stars.
You can read this and other movie reviews in my column at The Richmond Examiner.
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