The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band) (2009)
Directed by Michael Haneke
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The White Ribbon begins with a promise. The voice of an old man, not really sure about the story he is about to tell (“I don't know if the story that I want to tell you, reflects the truth in every detail”, he says), the voice that we will later see it belongs to one of the characters of the story, teacher in a German village before the First World War, wants to unveil a complicated chain of events, just because it’s relevant for the story of the country he lives in; not only interesting, not only out of the ordinary, but relevant. The pact is just about that: the pertinence of the incidents for the subsequent history of Germany. The beauty and subtlety come from the fact that this promise is broken twice. First, we are given a great deal of facts, lots of information, but in no apparent order. Secondly, the connection between the events and the History has to be made mostly by the viewer. As an imperfect historian, the teacher tells pretty the story pretty confusing, mixing what he saw and what he only heard of. This is why The White Ribbon is at least two things at the same time: a pseudo-inquiry and parable. From a generic point of view, The White Ribbon is both a modern detective story and a fable. Not that we aren’t used to simulacra when it comes to Haneke: his Funny Games was a pseudo-thriller, while Hidden may be another fine example of a pseudo-detective variation. The trouble with The White Ribbon is that it’s easy to enjoy it as a sophisticated, postmodern version of a detective story, apparently a whole sub-genre in itself if we think of Joon-ho Bong’s Memories of Murder or David Fincher’s Zodiac (not to talk of the highly praised Romanian film Police, adjective by Corneliu Porumboiu), but things get a lot more complicated when you have to find a meaning for Haneke’s most recent opus.
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This meaning, the film already has it. First, we are told that we’re about to see something equal to a historical document. In the original script, we were told even more; fortunately, the film doesn’t stick to Haneke’s original intentions. In the last page of the script, available in English at http://www.sonyclassics.com/awards-information/thewhiteribbon_screenplay.pdf, the relater openly adresses the main topic of the story: “Today, more than a quarter of a century later, toward the end of my life, and several years after the end of a second war that was to change this world in a more cruel and radical way than the first one, the one we faced at the time, I wonder if the events of those days and our silence about them, weren't the germ of the tragedy toward which we were heading. Didn’t we all know secretly what had happened in our midst? Hadn’t we, in a way, made it possible by closing our eyes? Didn’t we keep our mouths shut because otherwise we would have had to wonder if the misdeeds of these children, of our children, weren't actually the result of what we'd been teaching them?” Thereby, the script has an almost circular structure, resuming the events in the beginning and at the end of the story; first, we are told that the event will be pertinent; in the last lines, we are told why. As for the film, it lacks these explanations; probably, Haneke thought the film would be too explicitly didactic; hence, the epilogue consists only of a few facts, including what was thought of the events in the village; the teacher abruptly concludes with the information that he never saw any of the villagers again after the war. There are no revelations, no last moment clues, just a few questions, again, more openly put in the script that in the film: what could that or that character about the mystery in order for him or her to behave in such a manner? In the end, it’s more that we don’t know that we know. The film deliberately leaves the audiences the pleasure of finding a meaning, hiding the explicit thesis. But while Haneke is as cryptic as it could be as a director, as a media person he is more than happy to explain what the film is about, in the same terms he cut out from the script in order to leave the ending of the film open. In the same moralistic terms, he claims that The White Ribbon is mainly about intolerance, the perils of blind faith, not necessarily when it comes to religion, but to general principles, and terrorism; he hardly wants to be interpreted as depicting specifically the growing of the generation of German people who would later support Hitler and speaks rather of criticizing any intolerance, any totalitarianism, and so on. Who could prove him wrong? As moral theses aren’t essentially verifiable, the beginnings of all the intolerant ideologies might as well be found in the early education, be it secular or religious education. The “signature” left behind by the ones torturing the handicapped kid of the village is a note with a verse from the Old Testament, a verse about God’s rightfulness and his way of punishing, the kind of verse Tarantino used in Pulp Fiction, but this time ironically. As the teacher implies that the children of the village are guilty for the mysterious crimes happening and as we are presented the family of a Protestant pastor while he harshly punishes his children in the name of an ideal purity it’s easy to see where this film is going: children being punished in the name of innocence (hence, the symbol of the white ribbon) end up by secretly being the punishers themselves, and from here you could imagine the grown-ups in any intolerant society. Can you say Haneke is wrong because he has a simplistic view? Not really. The truth is Haneke is much more interesting when he addresses contemporary problems: modern life and the modern relationship between man and images of the modern era (from photography to cinema). Somehow, with his movies, Haneke has reinvented an old problem: the relationship between life and art, between life and its refection. In his older films, Haneke was at least challenging and original. With The White Ribbon, a film in which he addresses equally important problems as terrorism and extremism, he is anything but original. Somehow, all Haneke manages to do is to revive a few thesis on evil. Meanwhile, films about the futility and sadism of the education don’t sound as fresh as they did in the sixties or the eighties. What more can be said about the matter, after Pink Floyd transformed the whole matter into a slogan? Not much, we could say after watching The White Ribbon. This is why it was a brilliant strategy to leave the actual thesis out of the film; at least once, you can watch the film and praise the skills of a great director, even if you don’t get the full meaning, instead of having the unfortunate surprise of a accomplished film with a questionable agenda.
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It has been said already that The White Ribbon is hardly Haneke’s best film, even if it’s the film that actually brought him a Palme d’Or in 2009. It’s not the first time the jury seems to have awarded its outstanding prize in view of the previous films of the filmmaker who received it. Nevertheless, The White Ribbon may not be the best Haneke, but it has all the qualities of a genuine Haneke experience: austerity, ambiguity, an excess of the same themes (violence, guilt, etc.). You could say the latest Haneke is different from his acclaimed previous efforts only because The White Ribbon can give you the strange feeling of an adaptation for the big screen, which technically it is, since it’s based on Haneke’s own screenplay, but that’s not what this is all about. Rather, the film sound and feels like a faithful adaptation of a novel, mostly because the only time Haneke has used the background monologue of a character as a means of developing the plot was in his adaptation of Kafka’s The Castle. Meanwhile, all we get to know about the meaning of the events, we get to know from the one who tells the story, once a teacher in the village; it’s through his voice that Haneke makes from the first minute all his to-be-broken promises. Through the character, we find out which events are important, why, we are warned that an even more serious event is going to occur, and so on. Without the moralistic character that Haneke invented, The White Ribbon would be merely a more disturbing version of War of the Buttons. It’s the teacher that tells us that what happened in the village could be a smaller scale version of the events that would soon happen in Germany. If his opinions weren’t coincidentally the same with Haneke’s opinions in real-life interviews, we could consider a typically Haneke directed film, that is, whose most important particularity is the distance towards the facts. Take, for instance, Haneke directing Funny Games: we don’t know whose side is he on and that’s terrifying. But if you switch to The White Ribbon, we completely know whose side is he on, and that’s boring. If he managed to successfully translate a literary device into film, allowing the tension to grow with each intervention of the voice of the character and cleverly not fully releasing it even when the film is over, it’s through the voice of his invented character that he innocently states his own thesis about evil, which is dangerously close to a cliché. In the end, it’s of little importance that the thesis gets lost in the flow of the beautiful cinematography. When you try to understand what Haneke wanted to say, The White Ribbon becomes a beautiful film about nothing of any importance.
