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.

Film Review — Police, Adjective

You know you are watching a film made outside the United States when nothing explodes, no one dies, overdoses, is kidnapped or even arrested. One is then made completely certain of this fact when they realize they are watching a police procedural and none of the above circumstances come about to rescue the script from oblivion. A similar feeling comes to the foray while watching Police, Adjective, the new film from acclaimed Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 to Bucharest), who has crafted a deceptively simplistic story that proves Eastern European filmmakers continue to deserve special attention in the annual festival circuit, if not the Academy's.

Cristi (Dragos Bucur), an undercover cop in dreary Vaslui, Romania begins to take his assignment of shadowing suspected pot dealer Victor (Radu Costin) a bit more seriously after realizing he is simply a kid getting an occasional high with some friends from school. Viewing the crime as hardly an injustice to society, Cristi drags out his investigation, consuming several days without even changing clothes, hoping to find evidence exonerating the teen. Unfortunately, said evidence never surfaces, and Cristi is forced to face his boss with an update on the investigation, as well as the realization that the whims of his conscience are insignificant in the eyes of the law.

The Dardenne Brothers of Belgium have mastered a modern form of neo-realism in films like The Son (2002) and most recently in Lorna's Silence (2009) that feature a high degree of moral uncertainty and internal debate among the protagonists over the fate of another human being, often a complete stranger, who is in a compromised situation. Porumboiu's use of minimalism in plot and dialogue — which makes the film seem like an adaptation of an introspective crime novel — proves to be successful here in visualizing Cristi's haphazard discovery of his own conscience, therefore replicating in a way the Dardennes' technique.

There is also room left over for a thin thread of dark comedy in Police, Adjective. When Cristi's underdeveloped vocabulary is put in check first by his wife, and then again by his boss, he seems relatively complacent rather than humiliated. Ultimately, his lesson is a simple reminder that an enforcer of the law has only the authority to uphold what the law says, not what the individual moral voice or popular sentiment might dictate.

Film Review — The Beaches of Agnes

Something often said about artists is that it is far more difficult (and usually more rewarding) to swivel their focus around — whether it be a camera, a paintbrush or a pen — from the outside world into their own lives. The recent passing of J.D. Salinger recalls his self-admitted autobiographical character Holden Caulfield and Frederico Fellini's deeply personal ode to the pains and pleasures of filmmaking in 8 1/2 received an unnecessary homage — if you could call it that — in Nine. However thinly veiled, these works remained fiction rather than documentary, something that separates them from Agnes Varda's new film The Beaches of Agnes, a uniquely revealing self-portrait of a clearly talented artist.

As a member of the New Wave cadre of cineastes like Godard, Marker, Resnais and others, Varda has a remarkably humble sense of her own place in film history, especially being the widow of the French director Jacques Demy, known for musical films such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The year after he died of AIDS, Varda released a biographical film of Demy's childhood that she wrote and directed with what seems like very minor input from the man himself due to his illness. 80 years old at the time the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2008, Beaches is Ms. Varda's chance to share her life story while she can still do it her way, and in this endeavor she succeeds marvelously.

As with her long-time friend and colleague Chris Marker, who appears in the film only as a tableau cat with a mechanic voice, Varda has centered much of her work around the themes of time, memory and their effects on human relationships. In her breakout feature Cleo from 5 to 7, a young woman spends two hours contemplating the meaning of life as she awaits word from her doctor on whether she has malignant cancer or not. Throughout this film, Varda literally walks backwards into the past during each vignette, cleverly juxtaposing modern images and set designs with old photos and films as she narrates each story. The casual cinemagoer will likely be lost in what at times seems like a stream of consciousness recounting of very detailed happenings, especially as she admittedly veers into random yet humorous digressions. What remains amidst her genuine quirkiness however is a powerful meditation on the timeless nature of cinema.

With exponentially larger waves of new documentaries releasing every year on nearly any subject, Varda's mise-en-scène is as fresh and original as any one's, revealing her presence as not only a pioneer in her field, but an enduring master as well.