Cannes. "The White Ribbon"

By David Hudson on 05/21/2009

[Updated through 5/28]

"For quite some time at the beginning of Michael Haneke's latest film, which is a two-and-a-half hour parable of political and social ideas set entirely in a north German village in 1913 and 1914, you wonder what you're watching, how its disparate parts hang together and what it all might mean," writes Dave Calhoun for Time Out London. "More than ever, the playful, challenging, sometimes shocking director of 'Hidden,' 'Funny Games' and 'Time of the Wolf' solidly resists answering the 'what's it all about?' question and makes you work hard to make sense of what you're seeing. As in 'Code Unknown,' he resists focusing on one story or a limited number of characters and instead offers a wide, rich canvas of people and experiences linked only by the fact that they are neighbours and increasingly all subject to a burgeoning threat from within. The hard work pays off."

"When he is on top form Michael Haneke's artistry and unerring control of his material is hard to beat," writes Screen's Mike Goodridge. "And he is on top form in 'The White Ribbon,' a meticulously constructed, precisely modulated tapestry of malice and intrigue in a rural village in pre-World War I northern Germany. It's a rich, detailed work pregnant with the sinister undertones and evil deeds for which the film-maker's work is legendary and won't disappoint Haneke fans waiting for fresh material after his experimental US remake of 'Funny Games.'

"Ten years in the making, the black-and-white film tells the brutal tale of the going-on in a German village from 1913 to 1914, on the eve of World War I," writes David Bourgeois for Movieline. "We're introduced to various families in the village, perhaps none more strict and conservative than that of the stern and ultimately hateful Protestant pastor. He raises his gaggle of children with fascistic discipline, going so far as tying down the arms of his son, whom he suspects of masturbating. 'I wanted to project a group of children in whom absolute values were being imposed,' Haneke explained this morning at the film's press conference."

"Pairing visual mastery with a quietly immersive story, 'The White Ribbon' plays like a morbid version of 'Our Town,' patiently revealing the inward discord beneath the surface of a settled community." Eric Kohn for indieWIRE: "It's a frightening depiction of mortality."

Mike D'Angelo at the AV Club: "Strange things are afoot, we're told by the narrator - in the film's one surprising touch, this is an elderly version of the story's sole non-repugnant character, so we know he won't become a sacrificial lamb - but they're not really all that strange: a horse tripped by a wire here, a bloody beating there. Mostly they serve to illustrate Haneke's usual thesis, which is that human beings are inherently deceitful and cruel and hence unworthy of musical accompaniment, much less color.... It's just a big arty dose of castor oil."

Cannes posts extras.

Updates: "On a more symbolic level, though Haneke is too much the serious artist to spell it out, it's clear that this portrait of a sick society is meant to explain, at least partially, the horrendous war that breaks out at the very end of the film, and the fascism that quickly followed in its wake," notes Peter Brunnette in the Hollywood Reporter.

For the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu, this is "a surprisingly affecting forensic study of social breakdown."

Updates, 5/22: "There's much to admire, notably the finely etched, meticulous compositions," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Yet while Mr Haneke's critique of systems of domination is certainly persuasive - the fathers who beat their children will soon march to war on behalf of the Fatherland - it lacks the intellectual and emotional nuance that would make this largely joyless world come to life. One of the truths about Mr Haneke's work is that his totalizing worldview can feel almost as punishing and sadistic as the cruelty he metes out on screen. That's part of the point of course: the audience should feel wretched to appreciate that the world can be wretched, which reminds me of Sartre's comment that he didn't need to believe in God to be nice to his neighbors."

"Like Haneke's earlier film 'Hidden,' this is to some degree about the return of the repressed," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "Unlike that movie, however, 'The White Ribbon' is not about the repercussions of a single buried event, but a continuous diseased process, in which those without power - children and disenfranchised adults - are in a permanent state of futile rebellion against authority, expressed in spiteful acts of anonymous nastiness; these trigger spasms of fear in both the community and their masters, who respond by redoubling their resented discipline. And so the unhappy process goes on. The outbreak of war, with its promise of larger violence, is to provide a distraction without which the village's petty hell would simply have gone on for ever."

"In a climate of everyday repression and parental brutality, passed from generation to generation, any political evil is possible," writes Richard Corliss for Time. "Nazism can bloom in Germany, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the slaughtering armies in Rwanda and Sudan. Is man's humanity to man inherent? Or does it just have to be carefully taught? That is the central question of this fascinating film, which demands much of viewers and offers ample rewards for their involvement.... Haneke is not a perpetrator of cruelty but a prosecutor of it; and 'The White Ribbon,' constructed step by meticulous step, scene by forbidding, foreboding scene, is his grandest indictment of intolerance."

"In a Competition line-up that is intentionally overwhelmed by intentionally controversial cinema (Tarantino, Noé, Park, von Trier), Michael Haneke shows them all up by making a respectable picture," writes Daniel Kasman in The Auteurs' Notebook. "'White Ribbon' is more like a Western or an American television series than anything else, which is what makes it so much more audacious."

Updates, 5/23: Fabien Lemercier talks with Haneke for Cineuropa.

"The targets of Haneke's critique seemed liked straw men to me," blogs Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker. "And while the single historical event referenced midway through the film gives the film much-needed context, it also plants the suggestion that 'The White Ribbon' might just boil down to being a dramatically questionable take on the seeds of the 20th century German character."

In a dispatch to Time Out New York, Stephen Garrett calls this "one of Haneke's strongest works."

Update, 5/28: "As usual in Haneke's films, guilt is a communal rather than individual affliction, human decency a fragile flame flickering in the gale," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "For these reasons and more, Haneke has always been too bitter a pill for some audiences to swallow, but 'The White Ribbon' reaffirms him as the leading European filmmaker of his generation. It feels like a classic even as you are watching it for the first time, and is one of the films for which the 2009 Cannes Film Festival deserves to be remembered."

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 2009.

[Photo: "The White Ribbon," Sony Pictures Classics, 2009]

Tags: Cannes 2009, Michael Haneke, The White Ribbon