REVIEW: THE WHITE RIBBON

For all my best intentions, I was never meant to be a schoolteacher. I had many a meltdown and breakdown over just trying to teach my first graders. I hated disciplining them (as I always hated being disciplined in school) and tried pacifying them with screens. When I would scream at them, I felt the ultimate embarrassment of giving in to the base desire of screaming as punishment. Safe to say after I walked out of the classroom while a superior watched them to my car and subsequently my home, I was soon to quit being a teacher. Screaming and anger are not the building blocks to the growth and success of healthy children. 

So why do the superiors in The White Ribbon think their children won’t grow up to be as selfish, insulting and brutal as them? When you’re taught you’ll get hit when you deviate slightly, why are we surprised when Sigi gets thrown into the water for being slightly annoying? Children are sponges, and the best imitators there are. This is the generation Haneke is indicating will be amongst the rank of the world’s most feared antagonists of all, the Nazis. His mosaic approach to the storytelling here is inspired, seeing how the riptide of corrupt authority figures smothers the entire village. We can only pity the children and sympathize with the schoolteacher, indeed one of the only characters shown to have pity, understanding or graciousness shown towards the children. When he seemingly solves the riddle to who has been tormenting the village in small doses, he is shut down, threatened, silenced. When the baroness tells the baron of her love for another man and the brutality of the village for being her reason to leave, the baron only questions her infidelity. Nothing changes unless we want it to.

In the final shot as the elderly schoolteacher tells us what became of him as the war dawned, we see this power resume, as the children’s choir sings in the back of the church. It’s a fitting concluding image: the children are left unseen by the adults, their consequences behind them.