For one thing, the village is a rigid patriarchy.
"The White Ribbon" is a film of sinister power. You won't shake its mood easily.
This is a story that triggers questions of cruelty by humans, one to another, in
a diabolical culture visited by adults on their children.
We are
dropped into a village in northern Germany shortly before World War I. The movie
opens with the felling of a horse and rider by a trip wire that has been
deliberately set. This accident will be followed by others - a barn fire, a
brutal bullying of two innocent young boys, a saw mill death. Is it the pastor?
The doctor? The mid-wife? The nanny? The schoolmaster? Or is it a vengeful youth
or a raging parent? No need to ask. Director Michael Haneke has had the great
good sense not to pose the accidents as a mystery to be solved; once we get past
that need to know, we begin to wrestle the questions of human behavior. What is
woven into the fabric of this town and its culture that is encouraging
acceptance of brutality by all its people?
For one
thing, the village is a rigid patriarchy. Wives and mothers wear their hair in
severe buns and speak only when they need to direct their children to follow the
orders of their fathers. At the outset, when two children return home late to
worried parents, the father announces their punishment: no dinner and ten
strokes of the cane in front of their siblings. Each will wear a white ribbon
indefinitely, a constant reminder of the innocence and purity they have
violated. And so it continues throughout the village in a poisonous patriarchy
where the mere presence of a man silences a room.
Filmed in
black and white, the stark contrasts capture the extremes of the village. No
lightness or humor relieves the landscape or the people. The tools - pitchfork,
pump, scythe, are the strong and simple tools of the land, but the emotions that
have grown in this soil are malice, hate, envy, and revenge. This is a dark and
heavy gloom.
In our
longing for relief, we reach for the well meaning schoolmaster and his fiancé,
the nanny, but they lack the power to change either the village or our response
to it. Over the whole grim community, God is repeatedly invoked as the unseen
arbiter and power when men falter. And falter they do - the rage of the Baron
when his son is tortured; the fury of the doctor when he turns on his mistress
with a foul and brutal tirade.
We no longer
wonder who caused the accidents. We could understand any vengeance. But the
nature of the vengeance is sufficiently cruel and purposeful that we are plagued
by the big question: could this happen only in Germany, or is this yet again the
power of evil over good, of cruelty to the vulnerable by false power. Could it
happen here? Of course it could.
Copyright (c) Illusion