Imagine “Our Town” staged as a European horror movie. Thornton Wilder couldn’t have conceived a rustic community like the creepy one depicted in “The White Ribbon.”
Last week it was nominated for two Oscars and is the early favorite to win for best foreign-language picture. It already landed last month’s Golden Globe, the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and many awards for its luminous black-and-white cinematography. This latest work from writer-director Michael Haneke (“The Piano Teacher”) deserves the many accolades. It sucks you in with the tense intrigue of a thriller and multiple interwoven story lines of a soap opera. Yet, it also has the fleshed-out characters, perceptiveness and striking imagery of art.
We meet the inhabitants and are immersed in the culture of a German village in 1913, the year leading up to World War I. The epic is told mostly from the point of view of the town schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), the story’s most sympathetic figure. We encounter the doctor (Rainer Bock), the landowning baron (Ulrich Tukur), his estate steward (Josef Bierbichler), the village Pastor (Burghart Klaussner), a poor farmer and all of their families.
‘The White Ribbon’
4 out of 5 Stars
Stars: Christian Friedel, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur,
Director: Michael Haneke
Rated R for some disturbing content involving violence and sexuality.
Running Time: 144 minutes
In German With English subtitles
But what seems from the outside to be an idyllic example of quaint country life teems from the inside with dysfunction. It manifests over time in a series of mysterious incidents. The doctor is gravely injured, the intentional victim of a malicious stunt to throw him from his horse. A woman laborer dies in a freak work accident. A fire is set. Crops are destroyed. A spoiled child temporarily disappears; a disabled child is also targeted.
But why? Who in the village could be responsible? In a cloistered world grounded in strict discipline and compulsory interdependence, the truth comes gradually, frighteningly into focus. It emerges out of hidden resentments between the distinctly segregated social classes, sublimated rage and vengefulness, extreme sexual repression on the one hand and sexual abuse on the other, and the worst parenting skills imaginable.
The acting is brilliantly realistic and transporting, especially from the children in the large cast. Their little characters reap a destiny sewed for them by their elders.
And who will these youngsters be in 25 years when the next war begins? That’s the question the filmmaker has his narrator ask us. In microcosm, “The White Ribbon” means to foreshadow what came afterward for Germany. That makes it even more chilling.
