Film Review — The White Ribbon

Michael Haneke has made a substantial career of investigating the reaction of the human psyche in tense situations. In Funny Games, both the 1996 original and the 2007 remake, sadism puts a challenge to decency when two young men subject a vacationing family to seemingly random acts of depravity and insult. In Caché (2005), class warfare and the unacknowledged influence of youth play a major roll in dismantling yet another seemingly common family. Now with The White Ribbon, Haneke brings this formula of methodical provocation back in time to pre-WWI, small-town Germany to perhaps show us the origins of such behavior, an end to innocence and the inescapable nature of evil.

The small village of Eichwald is relatively secluded in northern Germany, and in the few seasons leading up to the outbreak of The Great War, very strange events occur there that change the community forever — according to the narrator of The White Ribbon, The School Teacher, who is recalling these happenings from what seems like an elderly age.

First, the town doctor and his horse are tripped up by a tightly strung wire as he returns home for the day, and he is hospitalized for weeks. The wife of a farmer is then killed when she falls through rotten floorboards. As the harvest comes around, and everyone is busy, this seems to be the end of it, but after the festival celebrating a successful season, a field of the town baron's cabbages are found destroyed. One of his son's mysteriously disappears and is found bound at the feet having been severely lashed. A barn is set ablaze in the middle of the night. A farmer commits suicide. The doctor molests his own daughter and resents the midwife who essentially acts as his slave. Her disabled child is found severely beaten with a cryptic note about divine retribution.

Amidst the chaos, the town's pastor attempts to salvage the little purity that is left in what was once a tranquil town by tying a white ribbon on his son's arm (who admitted to his practice of masturbation) to remind him of his obligations to God. This symbol is in affect a reminder to the other God-fearing inhabitants of Eichwald that they are living in sin, and as a result, must be punished.

The School Teacher, whose affection for the Baron's nanny makes him the closest thing the film has to a sympathetic protagonist, eventually catches on to who might be responsible for the recent wave of crime, but realizes the truth may be more dangerous than the deeds themselves.

Haneke originally intended for the project to be a three part television mini-series, and it is possible that this richly detailed story would have benefited from more fleshing out, but as a singular piece, Ribbon is truly chilling in its ordinariness. Voices are rarely raised, there is not a single scene of violence, only a couple gory images, and it all comes in sterile black and white. One gets the feeling that the War to End All Wars was inevitable, along with the one that followed.