The White Ribbon (2009): C+

Michael Haneke tones down the admonitory audience haranguing with his Palme d'Or-winning The White Ribbon, a welcome relief that nonetheless doesn’t salvage the film from being another of the Funny Games auteur’s unpersuasively rigid portraits of man’s venality. In the small Austrian agricultural village of Eichwald in the years preceding WWI, a place where church and farming are the dominate spheres of life, a spate of crimes – a doctor is injured when his horse is tripped by a mysterious wire; the local Baron’s son is tortured, as is a mentally handicapped child; a barn fire is set – casts a pall over the tight-knit community. Shooting in strikingly flat digital black-and-white, Haneke keeps most of these terrible events off-screen while focusing his gaze on the townsfolk, a quietly horrific bunch made up of domineering, abusive, child-molesting parents and packs of suspicious kids straight out of Village of the Damned. The only signs of goodness amidst the vast cruelty and depravity on display comes via a schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) and the young nanny (Leonie Benesch) whom he courts, and in his depiction of their love, Haneke exhibits, for the first time in years, genuine empathy for humanity. Their romance, however, can’t counter the increasingly inescapable fact that The White Ribbon is, for all its monochromatic aesthetic splendor, formal meticulousness, and period setting, simply the latest Haneke censure of the bourgeoisie, whose decorous exteriors mask ugly malice. Once it’s convincingly suggested [spoiler alert] that the town’s youth are to blame, their actions a response to the culture of suffering fostered by their guardian adults, Haneke’s tale reveals its true hand as one about “the return of the repressed.” Not content to leave his material abstract, however, the director also – via the schoolteacher’s intro narration that the story might “clarify some things that happened later in our country” – implicitly positions his film as an explanation for the origins of National Socialism, a tack at once moderately reductive (despite a valid point about the consequences of Germanic authoritarianism) and unconvincingly argued by The White Ribbon’s evocative but largely one-note people-are-creeps time capsule.

The 47th New York Film Festival