Susan Granger’s review of “The White Ribbon” (Sony Pictures Classics)
Reminiscent of “Children of the Damned,” Austrian writer/director Michael Haneke (“Cache,” “Funny Games,” “The Piano Teacher”) tells the foreboding tale of a former schoolteacher in a small, feudal German village in 1913, just before World War I.
The malevolence begins as the doctor (Rainer Bock) is seriously injured when his horse is tripped by a wire that has been deliberately strung between two trees in front of his house. Despite a cursory police investigation, the culprit remains undetected, perhaps hidden by a conspiracy of silence. Then a farmer’s wife is killed in the sawmill belonging to the Baron (Ulrich Tukur), the Baron’s young son is assaulted and a retarded boy is brutally beaten.
Why are these strange, seemingly unrelated crimes occurring in a corrosive place where exploitation and physical punishment flourish? Where the arrogant Protestant pastor (Burgart Klaussner) demands that his disobedient children wear a white ribbon, symbolic of innocence and purity, where he punishes his adolescent son for the sin of masturbation by tying his hands to the sides of the bed while he sleeps. Where the doctor is mean and insulting to the devoted midwife (Susanne Lothar) who not only assisted in his practice but also cared for his children during his hospitalization; where he may also be forcing an incestuous relationship on his teenage daughter. Where throughout all the misanthropic turmoil, the outwardly subservient, emotionally repressed Aryan children look on impassively, silent participants what may be a bizarre punishment ritual.
Meanwhile, the schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) courts the former nanny (Leonie Benesch) of the Baron’s children and the Baron’s wary wife (Ursina Lardi) departs because she hates living in a village permeated by “apathy, malice, envy and revenge.”
Meticulously detailed and photographed in stark black-and-white, this perceptive parable of the German national character reveals the festering cruelty, even sadism, which permeates the domination mentality of the villagers. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The White Ribbon” (“Das Weisse Band”) is an intense, enigmatic 8, raising provocative issues about rigid discipline and the abuse of power.
