Movie Review - 'The White Ribbon'

The White Ribbon Starring Christian Friedel, Burghart Klaußner, and Leonie Benesch Directed by Michael Haneke Rated R

The great filmmakers may choose different canvases, but they frequently return to the same themes. What drove Martin Scrosese in the early 1970s still does today. Hitchcock's obsession with voyeurism is played out over and over again and in Vertigo, which may well be his masterpiece, Hitch even becomes obsessed with his own obsession. It isn't just filmmakers. Songwriters, authors, and visual artists all come back to those first impulses they tried to express, whether out of love, frustration, hate, or more likely, a combination of all of them. Michael Haneke is a modern Hitchcock in that respect. He frequently revisits sexual repression, violence, and dysfunction, and tests our limits by presenting these emotionally bare themes under a two-hour microscope. If you don't wish for a troubling scene in a Michael Haneke film to end rather quickly, you will. “Violence in my films is shown as it really is,” Haneke told The New York Times in 2007. “The suffering of a victim. The viewer comes to see what it means to act violently — that’s why the films are often experienced as painful.” “I’ve been accused of ‘raping’ the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely — all movies assault the viewer in one way or another," the director added. "What’s different about my films is this: I’m trying to rape the viewer into independence.” The White Ribbon is another cold, calculating vision from Haneke, but it's one of his most impressive and visually compelling. It is also, as expected, a test of your endurance and will. It is not the sort of movie you can watch and appreciate on a lazy Sunday afternoon while you're doing the monthly bills. You must watch it intently from beginning to end, and there are moments where it feels like a caning, and not just because the children in the film often suffer from canings at the hands of their father. This film is unrelentingly sadistic, but not in the way American audiences perceive it; you won't confuse this with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Instead, Haneke tells the story of a German village in the years preceding World War I. His narrator tells us that the story will help explain "what happened" in his country, an indicator that we're watching elements that helped give rise to Nazi upheaval. But here, in the idyllic village of Eichwald, with its simple country doctor, its young, idealistic school teacher and its parade of the local minister's cherubic children? There are humiliating beatings the children suffer at the hands of their rigid father; the white ribbons of the title are ornaments the chidlren wear following their torture to remind those around them of how they failed to uphold the standards of their faith, or at least their father's perverse interpretation of it. The doctor, it can be said, leaves room for improvement. And it does not take long for us to wonder if the series of "accidents" that plague the village of Eichwald and frame this story for us aren't instead incredibly well-rehearsed retribution. If you have seen a Michael Haneke film before, this kind of weighty abuse will be nothing new. You might even find it to be his best film in years. Perhaps it is. There is beauty in its making - it is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Cinematography at this year's Academy Awards - and it isn't a comfortable juxtaposition with what lies beneath, and that's precisely the point. Films don't have to be easy. Here's Exhibit A.

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