The White Ribbon: Funny Ideals

There are historians, there are revisionists and then there are people who just rummage the dustbins and try to see what exactly went wrong or where exactly it started going downhill (a moral angle, if you will). This is different from a straightforward writing of history- from below, from above- wherever. The White Ribbon(2009) never tells you that World War I is only a year away from the beginning of the events in this movie, because everybody knows that. It doesn’t tell you anything about private lives of Archdukes at the time, nor does it detail a story of fascinating class struggles; although it does show you how things are not quite alright within the Baron’s family and class tensions have stretched the village like a taut bowstring. The implications of the movie, its importance and significance, is completely derived from things outside the movie. International directors with auteurist tendencies have a defined mode of storytelling. Michael Haneke is not an exception. Cache (Hidden, 2005), is in some ways a narrative like The White Ribbon, placed in the contemporary socio-political climate. The videos of the upper-middle-class family are made by unknown people and they depict nothing apart from their daily lives. The question one is likely to ask is- who is/are responsible for these videotapes and Haneke teases us into believing this to be the driver of the narrative. By the end, you understand that it wasn’t what Haneke was interested in at all. Haneke is a director who is interested in observing how people react in circumstances that- they ardently believe- are not of their own making. One can only be reminded here that Haneke has also adapted Franz Kafka’s The Castle for the screen. Although I have not seen this adaptation, it is easy to see what attracted Haneke to Kafka. It is easy but distracting to get mired into interpretations of Kafka stories. While they could certainly stand for complicated symbols and allegories, their fabulous nature lends them a quaint melodramatic edge (bleak, Haneke might be- but aren’t The Piano Teacher and Funny Games, in their relentless nature, somewhat melodramatic too?) . Kafka is also never interested in explaining why things happen to his characters (who knows?), but what exactly happens- in loving, poetic detail.

The White Ribbon is narrated by a schoolteacher reminiscing about certain strange events that happened in a small village in Germany about a year before the First Great War. It starts when the village doctor, riding home on his horse, trips on a narrow wire which throws him off and injures him severely for many weeks. Shortly after this, a woman working in a saw-mill falls through a weak floorboard and dies. Then the Baron, who employs almost half the village- including the woman, is also sucked directly into the strange events when his son is abducted and later found severely beaten and hung upside down in a barn. The schoolteacher-narrator does not hint as much as almost forces us to believe that the children of the village have something to do with these events. He constantly attracts our attention to them. The children, from their very first appearances, do not really look like they’re in ‘The Sound of Music’. A heavily repressed- sexually, politically and economically- community (society is too big a term, though it would not be misplaced here either) is all but passing their perversions, disguised as ideals, to their children, without seeming to be completely aware of it. When the eldest son and daughter of the village pastor commit some vague teenage mischief, the pastor chastens them with a stern speech, beats them with a cane and ties a white ribbon on them. The white ribbons, he tells them, signify purity and innocence; until the children align themselves completely to this ideal, the ribbon stays on them. The son of the pastor is discovered walking on the narrow ledge of a bridge by the narrator. When he rushes to save him before he falls, the boy gets down and in response to the narrator’s questions, says that he was only trying to see if God wanted him to go on living. It does not take an adult to see how internalization of ‘ideals’ is a running theme with the repressed children of the village.

As the disturbing outbreaks of brutal violence increases and begins to take on a ritualistic mode, the villagers hardly take any serious steps to find the culprits. This cavalier attitude, ironically, seems to vindicate the bizarre violence as it continues unabated with another attack on a disabled boy, the child of the village midwife (Susanne Lothar). She claims, towards the end, to know who the culprits were and leaves for a city nearby to get the police. However, she does not return and there is no trace of her son in the village either. Then, the villagers hear, the Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated.

The film is shot in black and white- not to make an intense statement, I think, but to simply invoke memories of the time that are already present in history books in black and white photographs. The effect is chilling nonetheless. Haneke, in his usual, relentless, fashion gives us a strong, dramatic narrative that does not pretend to be anything apart from just that- a narrative. It is really up to the viewer to believe what the schoolteacher says and even take it further and propose that these are the first signs of the National Socialist temperament to come. If the setting and the idea reminds you of M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Village’, you don’t have to be very hard on yourself. This makes you think again what an awesome exercise Shyamalan had attempted in that film, until he brought it down, brick by brick.

Children in Haneke’s films can hardly be said to be angelic. Benny’s Video (1992), an early Haneke shocker is about a young boy (the actor- Arno Frisch, grew up to be one of the two Funny Gamers) who brutally kills a young girl with multiple shots from a bolt gun. However, the children in Haneke aren’t exactly experimentally bred wild savages on strange islands either. Benny’s Video opens with a video recording of Benny’s father killing a pig with the same bolt gun. If Nazi killing in Nazi-occupied France or killing Bill is a bloodthirsty on-screen exercise of fun, the implications are dire, Haneke might pontificate. It would be a pity if that was all the point he had to make, and thankfully it is not so in The White Ribbon. He talks about violence that is taking place under the covers, behind closed doors (in one of the most brutal scenes of the film- we hear the children scream from cane-beatings on the other side of the door) and a violence that smothers the natural innocence of William Wordsworth’s children.

In some ways, one knows almost from the very beginning if one wants to ‘resolve’ the question of the strange events of the film by proceeding to take the narrator for granted. This will make The White Ribbon not only Haneke’s most accessible film, but one of the easiest ever made and leave you in peace to turn your attention to his Palm d’Or competitor Lars von Trier’s crazy shenanigans instead. Antichrist has everything onscreen, and for a scream, even talking foxes. It is a horror film that has all the makings of ambitiousness without ambition. But to direct a huge, ensemble cast in a film that sweeps over every imaginable terrors of the past century (and further), with an arrogant self-assurance is what sets a great filmmaker apart from a mere provocateur.

*The White Ribbon won the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year (2009)