The White Ribbon - Not as Simple as Black and White

The White Ribbon, from German filmmaker Michael Haneke, is not so much about who committed the crimes as about how the people respond now that they live in a community where such crimes have happened. It takes place in a village in Germany in the years before World War I. The village is a simple community built on the property of The Baron, who has employed the villagers as farmers, and treats them well.

The film opens with the town's doctor falling from his horse after it trips over a wire strung between two trees. Someone must have strung the wire up, but no one confesses to it, and no one would have a motive to injure the only doctor in town. Some children are blamed - blame must fall somewhere. They are punished, and their father insists they wear white ribbons around their arms, professing their innocence, until they can again be trusted.

Subsequent crimes are committed - a barn is burned down, a child is murdered, another child goes missing only to turn up, unharmed, a few days later. Another is blinded. It is never discovered who committed these crimes. Some of them may have been provoked by earlier acts of malice, and were acts of revenge. That is not the point.

The point is, the entire town is now marred. It loses its innocence. Neighbors begin not to trust each other. They begin not to see each other the same way. Vicious things are said. The doctor, who has begun an affair with his nurse after his wife has died, suddenly denounces her as ugly and worthless. He says he always felt this way. The children, even, begin to attack each other. One child throws another into a river and steals his whistle, then denies that it happened even after his father beats him. Morality disintegrates, replaced with suspicion and hostility, for both parents and children. Suddenly children who were playing in the fields, who were eager to apprentice their superiors, are now eavesdropping and tattling on one another.

Haneke has never been an easy filmmaker to stomach, and The White Ribbon will not go down easy. If you are infuriated by Haneke's penchant for leaving mysteries unsolved, then The White Ribbon, at 2 hours 20 minutes, will bore you. If you approach the film as an exploration of character rather than a thriller, then it will intrigue you.

It is a beautiful film, filmed in black and white and filled with stark landscapes, and the cast, especially the children, are exceptional at portraying a sort of Adam and Eve, before and after Eden. It's not that the town was without corruption, and as it progresses, awful transgressions are revealed that were seeded before the doctor fell off his horse.

At the center of the film are two characters who remain the most innocent; a schoolteacher (who also narrates), and the much younger woman he falls in love with. Their courtship, as it slowly develops, is charming and tasteful, and in contrast to the storm around them. They are, perhaps, the only ones who leave the film with any innocence intact.