There’s something unsettling about the children in The White Ribbon, but the film remains open to interpretation.

The White Ribbon

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We are trained, as moviegoers, to look for clues when something goes wrong. Even the most jagged and disorienting film noirs have a questing protagonist at their centre and an answer at their conclusion. For the vast early stretches of The White Ribbon, there is neither, and we never arrive conclusively at the latter. Director Michael Haneke pulls his razor-sharp story of repression and repudiation taut, a filmed version of the tripwire that begins his pre-war German village's descent into a freefall of suspicion and cruelty. There is a deep rot in the village, seemingly as unbending and strong as the thin dark trees and planks that fill and surround it.

The story begins when the village doctor rides his horse into the above-mentioned tripwire, badly injuring himself. It was not an accident, but no culprit is found. More incidents seem to manifest spontaneously, always unseen, and the pretence of innocent misfortune cannot be maintained. The villagers look at each other differently and old cruelties rise to the surface. We observe grudges that cross generational lines and look to the children, but Haneke stops short of providing conclusive proof, denying traditional allegations of malice and victimhood. The children rise to adulthood untarnished in the eyes of parents who must surely suspect more than they admit to, and much has been made of the film’s parallels to fascism and Nazism. To this end, The White Ribbon offers a possible origin point for later, more egregious corruptions of the German soul, but its purposeful lack of motivation leaves us without the “why” to complement and understand the “what.”

The White Ribbon is narrated decades after the fact by a then-young schoolteacher. Through his job, he is uniquely positioned to observe the worsening moral crisis, which seems to plague the youth and also to transcend the social hierarchy of the parents, whose behaviours and relationships are rigidly coded with a puritanical bent. As the audience, we have the closest to an objective viewpoint, so, for us, the writing is on the wall before the villagers even begin to follow the expected cues. But so much of the film happens in privacy, behind closed doors or in the dark, and the version of events we see seems to bend to the hearsay of narration, so what do we really know?

All we can be sure of is Haneke's withholding, austere touch. The White Ribbon is a very different type of puzzle from the more familiar Mulholland Dr. shotgun blast or the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind kaleidoscopic effect, preferring to work with strict angles that never quite add up.