With The White Ribbon, Austrian directorMichael Haneke weaves a gradually spellbinding, ultimately mysterious tapestryof a time and place. As in earlier films such as Caché, Haneke holds back crucial information, implying that we cannever fully know the reasons why anything happens. Immaculately crafted in thepale tones of memory, in black and white, TheWhite Ribbon examines the lives of the three classes of people who inhabitthe village. At the top of the feudal order are the baron and his family, andat the bottom are the peasants who work in his fields and mills. Between themare a middle class and a rippling gulf of malice and mistrust.
Other than a singlebicycle owned by the baron and occasionally loaned to deserving townsfolk,little has changed in the village for more than a century. Electricity hasn’treached the area and motorcars are unseen on the dusty roads. The barondominates the town and bestows his bounty on the populace at the harvestfestival. Farm work is done by hand. A stern Lutheran ethos, maintained by apastor out of Ingmar Bergman, rules the imagination. When the town doctor isthrown from his horse by a tripwire strung between trees along his accustomedpath, the apparently placid, unchanging order is disturbed. It will be only thefirst in a string of unsolved crimes, some of them horrible to contemplate.
The White Ribbon takes its title from the bands of white the pastor forces his childrento wear as a reminder of the purity they should aspire to attain. His is areligion of guilt without penance. The pastor isn’t heartless, but he cares forhis children within the rigid bonds of a belief that demands much whileoffering few consolations. Like many of the adults encountered in The White Ribbon, he is flawed and oftencruel but not wholly evil. The children, sometimes the victims of their societyand sometimes the victimizers, remain mysterious.
A thin mist of unresolved suspense clings to The WhiteRibbon, whose story of many tribulations is brightened only fromthe love that blooms between the shy schoolmaster (Christian Friedel) and theshy, teenage nanny from the baron’s estate (Leonie Benesch). They are thefilm’s most likable people, but, of course, it’s the schoolmaster’s story. Thenarrator never identifies which “things that would happen in this country” areclarified by his account (the rise of Nazism?). Like the string of crimes thatplagued all classes in the village, TheWhite Ribbon is more a lament for the human condition than a social orpolitical critique.