Oct

13

White RibbonThe White Ribbon

Directed by Michael Haneke's [Austria]
In German, English subtitles.

Cast: Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Tukur, Burghart Klaubner, Michael Kranz, Marisa Growaldt, Josef Bierbichler, Leonie Benesch (Sony Classics)

Think Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” moved up a century or two, and set in Germany in the early 20th century. Or think Grace Metalious’es 1956 PEYTON PLACE, removed from Middle America and straitened into prim and constraining clothing. Even William Golding’s LORD OF THE FLIES comes to mind. The children here are not cherubs, but as guilty as are the adults.

The images evoked in this astringent, 2½ hour black/white study of deflected lives are of passions barely under control, people seething with unexpressed rage, unpalliated emotion, s_xuality inexpertly stuffed into societally correct gear and guises.

Director Haneke paints an iconic, if austere, masterpiece in violent villagers trying to cope with familial secrets, ugly liaisons, unholy alliances—while looking for all the world like a religious broach of impeccability. The roots of evil. Of fascism. Of religion owning nothing religious.

The town minister thinks he is fair, but he is brutal, unable to show love for his mistreated, heavily restrained children. The town doctor seems a model of probity, but is carrying on a brutally unloving s_xual dalliance with a widow with whom he shares less than nothing, insulting her whenever she asks for a crumb of affection or self-regard. Wives live in frank terror.

People are being hurt in a town with no apparent ‘reason’ for these ‘accidents.’ The doctor is felled while riding his steed of an afternoon. A child is taken into the nearby woods and flayed to within an inch of his young life. A town building is set afire in the darkness of deep night. The rich baron and his wife are not liked, though they employ half the town, and displeasing the baron, especially, spells economic disaster. Children are severely punished without the opportunity to explain or remark on the injustice of the offense they may not have committed. Wives try to flee cruel husbands, without much luck. Children with disabilities are tormented.

All told, it is probably much like our early childhoods, actually. Maybe others’ too.

The lack of color well suits the subject matter, the time just before the Archduke is assassinated, the world is holding its collective breath, and the vileness of the village under its starched aprons and canonical vestments is a caution for so many towns and villages of the past, and those yet to come.

In interview, the director knew very particularly his goal, and his aim was to point to a former time as a metaphor for the later times we all know perhaps too well. His effort is as shocking, but as powerful, as highly decorated German artist Anselm Kiefer’s huge, haunting sodden ‘artworks’ of earth, jagged metal, torn railroad ties and ground glass. They are art only to the extent that they evoke and point haunted fingers at his country for the havoc wreaked on the world in more than one World War.

Not a pretty picture. DER WEISSE BAND is rich with ironies and metaphors viewers cannot escape, even if they leave the theatre mid-film. Probably one of the more important films of the past decade, this director’s searing vision is in its way a cleansing blame, a scalding lesson.


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