The last couple of minutes of THE WHITE RIBBON, was spoilt for me,only because the new digital technology at Prestatyn's Scala Cinema, let everyone down by removing the subtitles from the screen!Having said all that, the audience generally worked the final conversation out for ourselves not that it gave any clear cut conclusion to one of the best films I have seen in the past few years.
The White Ribbon is an unsettling,suspenseful and truly gripping ensemble piece set in a small isolated German village before the start of World War 1.
The village suffers a series of seemingly unrelated but unnerving dramas over a period of a year. The village doctor is injured in a riding accident, a woman is killed in a sawmill and two children are tortured and beaten. At the same time other more "minor" mishaps befall other seemingly upright and respected families. The parson's pet bird is butchered, the Baron's son is bullied and a baby becomes ill in mysterious circumstances, and the narrator (who is crucially an outsider and the villager schoolmaster) by default tries to to work out what is indeed going on.
Director Michael Haneke cranks up the sense of dread and malice slowly and deftly, especially when the onion skins of respectability are peeled away from the characters, revealing a community run by extreme discipline , punishment and in one awful case, sexual abuse. The Children of the village are key to this movie. as they roam around in the background in an ever present pack, yet, we are never fully sure that it is their abused personalities that are central to the strange events and heavy atmosphere.
Everything in The White Ribbon is left open ended and unsettling, and as the villagers are finally led into the war, we the viewers are left with more questions about the approaching fascist threat, a decade or so away and we are left wondering about what role the children will play as they approach adulthood in the changing German world
Key scenes linger long in the mind. A child frightened and alone searching for his sister in a dark house. A tearful teenage boy being lectured about the horrors of masturbation, and the dreadfully calm verbal abuse delivered to the doctor's mistress, all add up to unsettle and wrong foot the viewer time and time again.........and I must admit that it is a long, long time since a film opened up so many avenues for analysis and review after the last reel is over.
I gave it a brilliant 9.5 out of 10
thanks for the synopsis, now I know and don't have to suffer from it. The insights and parallels exposed here can be applied to humanities development. So happy you saved me from being haunted by this movie. Have you started seeds yet? Peace
ReplyDeletethat is humanity's - like as a whole -
ReplyDeleteShame about those missing subtitles, but glad you liked the film so much. I think the seriousness of Haneke's work is always invigorating, and, for me, THE WHITE RIBBON was one of his best yet. Have you seen any of his other films? HIDDEN?
ReplyDeleteWhat a fine film and the black and white photography was so rich and atmospheric. Which is where the problems with the subtitles lay as I understand it. Strictly speaking it was not the Scala's equipment that was at fault.
ReplyDeleteArtificial Eye, the distributors, found that there was a problem on greys so they developed a new formula for the subtitles but then found that several cinemas around the country experienced the same problem as at the Scala. It doesn't seem to have occured to them to send this information out however.
So now I need to wait for the DVD so that I can at least know what was being said during those closing scenes. It certainly didn't spoil the experience of a stunning film and at least we were there on the Wednesday night. The cinema didn't show it on the Thursday because of the missing subtitles.