(4.5/5)A tightly scheduled film festival is admittedly the wrong circumstance under which a person should watch, let alone review, a film such as Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winning masterpiece, The White Ribbon. Even under optimal conditions one viewing is probably insufficient. This is a film that demands your attention, and in the tradition of earlier work (i.e. Cache) it provides few easy answers as to what you have just witnessed. One must be part detective piecing together the information onscreen to bring into relief the finer details of its moral parable.
In an idyllic village in the north of Germany, a series of inexplicably violent acts stir the inhabitants’ puritan assumptions, forcing them to confront the ugly side of the human spirit. Weaving together a cross-section of the village, focusing especially on the education of the youth, The White Ribbon is Dickensian in scope, and at times confusing as one tries to keep a tally of all the characters involved. The story is told as prologue to the fascist uprising in Germany, the sins of the parents ushering in a new generation of frenzied idealists. The eponymous ‘white ribbon’ is a kind of scarlet letter used by one family in the film to single out impure behavior. Once marked with a white ribbon tied around their upper arms, the children are supposed to be reminded of their sin in the hopes of cleansing themselves, a clear analogue to the WWII Star of David badges this generation will later help enforce. This example barely scratches the surface of what struggles, familial, religious, even sexual come to a boil in this frank portrait of puritan values in corrosion. » Read the rest of the entry..
