Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon)
Director: Michael Haneke
Writer: Michael Haneke
Producers: Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka, Margaret Ménégoz, Andrea Occhipinti
Stars: Christian Friedel, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur, Ursina Lardi, Fion Mutert, Michael Kranz, Burghart Klaußner, Steffi Kühnert, Maria-Victoria Dragus, Susanne Lothar, Sebastian Hülk, Mercedes Jadea Diaz, Josef Bierbichler, Marisa Growaldt, Janina Fautz, Thibault Sérié, Leonard Proxauf, Michael Schenk
The feeling is that films have covered the Holocaust; exhaustively even. We have seen its horrors in Schindler’s List, watched its evolution in the shadows of willfully blind hedonism in Cabaret, seen attempts to cope in the aftermath by societies (The Reader) and individuals (The Pawnbroker); and that barely scratches the surface of available titles for your Netflix queue.
But here is something different, a film that wants to wind the clock even further back from this event that defined the human capacity for evil by our modern understanding. It looks back before the Reich, before Weimar, even before the first World War that left Germany smoldering, and seeking someone to blame. Das weiße Band (translation: The White Ribbon) is a masterwork of slow-motion dread, taking a story that a lesser filmmaker would have seen as a simple mystery, and turning it into an meditation on a society at the precipice. It lingers precisely because we know its story has not ended when the credits roll.
Clinical terminology seems most appropriate. Writer/director Michael Haneke (Caché, Funny Games) has created, in a little German village in the 1910’s, a Petri dish, where cultures of sadism, xenophobia, and patriarchal control masquerading as morality fester beneath the happy rituals of the harvest, the dance, and the Sunday service. And with the agonizingly precise camera movement that is his trademark, he glides around the place, studying where and how the growing corruption shows itself.
He is a detached scientist, but not an emotionless one. You can feel genuine pity and fear and disgust; even a few sweet laughs as an earnest local schoolteacher and choirmaster (Christian Friedel) courts a young woman (Leonie Benesch) who works for the local Baron (Ulrich Tukur). They may be the last people looking for happiness in this place.
What is happening is that incidents of malicious violence and cruelty are popping up with increasing regularity, and no one can find who is responsible. A Doctor (Rainer Bock) is thrown from his horse when a wire is stretched across his riding path. Someone destroys a field prized by the Baron’s wife (Ursina Lardi); and thus brings ruin on his own family. A barn catches fire.
And there are personal cruelties too, happening behind the white walls. The town parson (Burghart Klaußner) tries to train away his son’s adolescent compulsions by tying him to his bed at night. A sexual affair reaches an endpoint of the most callous insult, as the man matter-of-factly declares that he has endured his lack of attraction for the woman over the years because it is simply too inconvenient to travel to the neighboring village for a prostitute. And all over the village, the members of the children’s choir wander – watching events more silently and intensely than you would expect of children. The performance, even the look, of the juvenile actors is vital to this film’s success; not just for the stories we see them passing through, but the deeds we know they will undertake as adults.
Haneke’s film, painted against snowy, wodded vistas in mesmerizing black-and-white, is a calculated repudiation of traditional construction. His editing rhythm subtly upsets you, skipping in and out of scenes and storylines, not trying to trace a plot but to build events and moods into a dissonant harmony. As it churns deliberately through 2½ hours, your skin begins to crawl from the overwhelming sense that something is very wrong in this hamlet. But you cannot identify the “what” in a way that can be arrested or excised – that would be the easy answer. And the Holocaust did not happen because it had an easy answer.
It is a tough film – lacking the excitement of hope, or the release of resolution. It is designed to be slow, but that does not make it easier to watch. We have a sense of whodunit, but it is far too late to matter, because the town has become what plagues it. The love story deliberately placed to struggle for life amidst it all is like a blotch of color that allows the movie to define its proximity to much uglier things.
Haneke is fierce, practically ruthless, in his vision. Even in his misconceived Funny Games he demonstrated a facility with the camera that allows him to almost never depict an actual act of violence, and yet provoke greater disgust and fright because he does not give you the mind-disabling shock, the sting of music, anything that might change the tempo. He wants the relentless march towards death he imagines for this culture, and captures it thoroughly.
The White Ribbon is remarkably well-thought and well-executed. Can I recommend it to you? Only if you have read these descriptions and can see yourself watching something like this for the length of a Harry Potter movie. For many people, this does things they simply do not want a film to do. And I believe that Michael Haneke understands that. That human nature can cultivate the will to ignore and deny things about itself; that we can, in fact, ignore, on a societal scale, our capacity to sin against each other for over a generation while it festers into something inconceivable, is part of its thesis. I’m not saying you need to sit through this movie to know that. But it is one breathtaking reckoning.