Film: The White Ribbon
By Jana Perkovic • Aug 13th, 2009 • Section: Film
THE WHITE RIBBON
The White Ribbon
Melbourne International Film Festival
Tue 4 Aug, Sun 9 Aug
With his new film, Michael Haneke ploughs his customary fields of collective guilt, invididual crime, shrouds of secrecy and social dysfunction. Set in an Austrian village on the verge of World War I and shot in glistening monochrome, The White Ribbon observes this microcosmos as strands of sadism, lust, affection and punishment unfold.
Told through the steady voiceover of the village teacher, The White Ribbon attempts to paint a picture that, in breadth, range of focus and moral ambiguity rivals the 19th-century social novel. There is no clear protagonist, and no discernible dramatic arc. Instead, the zig-zagging paths of numerous characters from multiple families are given time to cross, tangle and untangle. The pastor’s, and his six children forced to wear white ribbons on their sleeves for a whole year, to remind them of the moral purity they have so far failed to attain; the doctor’s, whose accident involving a horse and a long wire opens the film, sends him to the hospital, and leaves his two children in the care of the village midwife, his informal companion; the baron’s, whose estate employs half of the village, whose distant, moody wife and child are never more than ambiguous about the pleasures of country living, and whose children’s nanny, a girl from the next village, becomes the teacher’s love interest. During the course of the year, this pastoral image is tainted, again and again, with acts of inexplicable, often extreme cruelty.
Like Haneke’s earlier films, so is this one about the return of the repressed. But this time it is not a single act, returning and echoing through the post-traumatic life. Faithful to the novelistic approach, The White Ribbon observes calmly, without a hint of hysterical finger-pointing, the long, steady process by which those without power are in continuous, futile but furious, rebellion against the established power. The culprits are never clearly identified, but that is beside Haneke’s point. The White Ribbon, with its wide-angled social lens, suggests that, in the diseased process of cyclic discipline and punishment, the resentment and retaliation against the authority merely shifts around the society, now here, now there. The Great War of 1914, everything considered, comes as no surprise.
What works in prose may not be so successful on celluloid. Several hundred of the MIFF audience seemed impatient with Haneke’s slowly rolling yarn, and the palpable enjoyment of character portraiture and event description never took off with quite the same success. Still, The White Ribbon is a visually perfect film, with impeccable performances, and if it is broad and deep rather than taut and sharp, well, I’d like to think the world cinema is big enough for both.
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