In Michael Haneke's chilling The White Ribbon, a German town's terror becomes a puzzle without a solution
by Sam Smith
The only thing that disappoints me more than the unwillingness to watch a black-and-white film with subtitles is the notion that movies shouldn't ask you to think. Few filmmakers have received as much grief for asking this of their audiences than Michael Haneke. The 67-year-old Austrian filmmaker, embraced in Europe, has never quite had what you might call a breakout success in the United States. But through his career he has picked up legions of disciples here with films like The Piano Teacher, Caché and Code Unknown — films that share a methodically constructed signature of psychological terror, and should be seen knowing as little as possible about what is to come. His newest film, The White Ribbon, winner of the Cannes Palme d'Or and an Oscar nominee for best foreign film, disperses that terror across a stark and wide new landscape.
The setting is an imaginary German village in the years before World War I whose habitants — including a doctor, pastor, baron, farmers, a village midwife and a group of children — are terrorized by a series of unseen and unexplained violent incidents that threaten their faith, trust and sense of security. Like the town in Haneke's television adaptation of Kafka's The Castle (or the town of Lars von Trier's Dogville, to draw comparison to another divisive European auteur), the isolated village of The White Ribbon serves as the biosphere for Haneke's preferred system: a tight fictional conceit that forces the audience to confront and process the physical, emotional and psychological violence onscreen — and their own duplicity as spectators and consumers of it.
It could be said that this relationship between viewers and the often troubling images they see onscreen is the only thing that interests Haneke. This draws no small resentment from the director's critics, who claim he's a pedantic sadist who enjoys haranguing, guilt-tripping and manipulating audiences with characters written solely as vessels for his ideas. This criticism strikes me as irrational: all films manipulate their viewers, and our response to that manipulation is one of Haneke's pet subjects. Nevertheless, detractors point to films such as Funny Games, his English-language remake of his own earlier film, in which Haneke rehashed a brutal snuff-movie scenario that turned viewers by design into accomplices. They point to Caché, which deliberately rejects its audience's entitlement to a neatly wrapped denouement.
The White Ribbon has been largely exempt from this backlash — even though our hunger for closure remains just as insatiable as it was after Caché's (in)famous last shot. We naturally want to solve The White Ribbon's mystery, to figure out who's behind the village's evil deeds. Is it the ice-blond children? The adults? Both? Neither? As we learn more, we understand even less: The many pieces of the puzzle may connect, but to what? In a way, the movie feels liberating after the constricting moral gauntlet of Funny Games. Instead of telling us what to think about what we see, Haneke tells us nothing.
The White Ribbon is a challenging film, offering neither shocking moments to cling to nor a contemporary backdrop to channel a sense of real-world intrigue. But its most obvious distancing mechanism is also its most effective: the monochrome palette of Christian Berger, whose work here often feels like the reason cinematography exists. Shot on color film, then digitally reduced to high-contrast black-and-white, Berger's images set the film in a dreamlike realm for Haneke's classical exploration of human nature. The effect is not unlike the mythic stage on which Bergman set The Seventh Seal, a film that shares much in common with this one. In one sense The White Ribbon is historical, admitting a curiosity towards Germany's subsequent history and the roots of its haunting atrocities. The film's ultimate interests, however, are far more elusive. The images are black-and-white. The film is anything but.
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