Note: Taken, and extended, from my original Cannes Review of The White Ribbon:
There is nothing slight about this opus, Haneke’s most recent project: a two-and-a-half hour story of a small German town pre-WWI and the strange occurrences that go on after the town’s doctor gets in a horse accident (one of the opening and most haunting shots of the entire film). The stank repression of the townsfolk comes into to focus as odd ritualistic violence weighs down morale. And the weight is to be felt by all, viewers not discluded. It is what Haneke has, and will continue to, do as a filmmaker. He makes movies that force those watching to struggle with the characters, and the experience is something close to torture.
Ribbon may be his most torturous yet. The length, desaturated frames and lack of cuts work to visually burn the idea of fascist control (which is what this film revolves around) into your irises. At once, it is impressive and frustrating, explaining how the film earned the Palme d’Or at Cannes despite a third of the audience walking out before the final hour.
A frame with a chair in the center (and not much else) is held at wide for what feels like minutes at a time, the soft rumblings of the wooden house it sits inside rising up and falling down. Even dialogue (what precious little there is) is long-winded and honest, more confessions than conversations. One, in particular, comes to mind, in which a husband admits to truly hating everything about his wife – to his wife.
However, the film’s not about the chairs or the husbands or the wives, or even the pedantic doctor who feels the need to narrate the events within this town. It’s about the children; the repressed children itching to escape a world more contained than the one M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, and far less exciting. The kids are taught not to be scared of monsters in the woods, but rather fathers in their homes. Unfortunately, they’re being taught by the same people they fear.
With WWI on the horizon, viewers are meant to see its inevitability – that it doesn’t take Nazis to start a war, but merely religious zealots and those rebelling against that kind of upbringing. In short, humans.
If the magic of the movies is escapism, then Michael Haneke is the grand dark sorceress, bent on preventing his movies to allow any facet of escape.