The Abiding Sadness of Michael Haneke’s White Ribbon

There were varied reactions after yesterday’s screening of the Palme d’Or winning The White Ribbon at the New York Film Festival. On one hand, it is every bit as brutal and bleak as Caché–almost to a startling degree to some fellow viewers sitting around the first few rows. But on the other hand, If you want proof the Cannes Film Festival is a joke, then look no further than this Children of the Corn remake that won.

Of course, being mainstream is the least productive thing on Michael Haneke’s mind these days.

“I chose this period in [Germany] because it offers the most prominent form of extremism in any kind,” he said through a translator during the press conference. The question related to whether Haneke’s choice of Ribbon’s setting a scarce few months prior to World War I was an attempt to symbolize the constant despair and violence committed. Yet in his continued worldview, “it would be an error to reduce the film rather to this specific period and country.”

In the Haneke mind-set, everyone is at some point guilty of the violence they will inevitably cause. Ribbon, as told by an elderly sounding narrator who we learn is a 31-year old schoolteacher, is primarily about children inheriting and dealing with the sins of their parents. Whether it be incest, abuse, implied revenge or good ol’ fashioned senseless violence, Haneke’s film strives to remind us that this is universal.

But different strokes for different folks, as some German speakers in the audience took note with Haneke’s “dumbing down” and “formalizing” within the subtitles.

“That’s the reason for the subtitle that appears underneath on screen written in old fashioned German writing,” Haneke said. In fact, beneath the title is -”A German Children’s Tale.”

Others–namely one woman–saw many similarities with Arthur Miller’s The Cruicible, which provided a strange peek into the audience’s mind since the same question was later asked of Pedro Almodovar at the Broken Embraces press conference. Despite the argument of modern ideas and culture, Haneke’s Ribbon is bleak. Quite intentionally so, according to the director, who used black and white imagery to force “spectactors,” as he calls the audience, to “think about the period…for that reason it’s easier for [them] to enter the period. Black and white always makes a certain distance in [them.]”

Much like anything he does, there’s also a darker motive to contrast his seemingly pretty conversatinon piece.

“It works against the claim of reproducing reality in the same way that the film begins–with the narrator and the tale he wants to tell us…the film never claims it is offering accurate depictions of what took place, rather it offers artifacts and always tries to rouse a sense of mistrust in the audience,” he said.

Go to the Current_Movies Blog to see the rest.