Unfunny games

Novels are so frequently morphed into films that adaptation is now more surprising in its absence. In the case of Michael Haneke's (Funny Games) The White Ribbon, one is tempted to do just the opposite and put its austere, unforgiving images of a rural pre-WWI German town into words, if only to understand it better. 

Of course, such an act would rob The White Ribbon of what gives the film its unique power — the subliminally terrifying, unseen acts that linger off screen. It is a horror film in which the unknowability of the shadows themselves creates fear, rather than what lurks behind them. 

The audience is lured in innocuously enough through the perspective of the affable, eager to please School Teacher (newcomer Christian Friedel), whose occupation doubles as his name. Though we see a number of scenes and obtain information his character is not privy to, his perspective is still the moral compass through which the audience views the events.

Three appears to be the organizing principle in the movie. Three men — The Doctor (Rainer Bock), The Baron (Ulrich Tukur) and The Pastor (Burghart Klaussner) —  largely hold all the power in the town. When The Doctor's horse is tripped with a thin piece of fishing wire, the schoolteacher begins to think that something is amiss. 

Defining the majority of the characters with simply their occupations and not their names is a charming small town touch (think Bob the Builder) at first but later begins to seem much more sinister. The Baron's son is found, whipped and hanging upside down. Later his barn is set on fire. A local mentally handicapped child is also found abused and in shock. 

The acts themselves are never shown, just their bewildering aftermaths. With the majority of the plot pushed to the margins, the audience is forced to narrow their focus and examine seemingly unrelated tertiary events. 

For example, The Pastor uses the white ribbons himself, changed to active voice to signal purity and remind his oppressed children to walk a righteous path. Of course, the cost of maintaining this innocence is steep. When The Pastor discovers that one of his children is masturbating, his hands are tied to the side of his bed at night. Even The Doctor's toddler son's wide-eyed question, "What's ‘dead'?" forces the audience to think. 

Eventually the white ribbons begin to look more like nooses, as if the constricting puritanical morality of The Pastor is choking the town to death. This idea becomes more prominent when The Pastor finds his parakeet mutilated into a cross on his desk.

It is extremely difficult to even begin to classify The White Ribbon. The film is extremely gothic, with the stark black-and-white cinematography only highlighting the monochromatic garments of the characters. It is also a sort of extreme historical realism, forcing one to consider if the people of the past were just as horrifying as the people of the present, afflicted with incest, sociopathic behavior and religious zealotry. 

Perhaps the best way to think of the film is simply as one by Haneke. His films, though seemingly disparate, are similarly bleak enough to form their own subgenre. Haneke appears to make movies only to challenge rather than to please the audience. In the United States version of his Funny Games, he wanted to expose the audience's compliance to the torturing of an innocent family for entertainment. 

With mournful pacing, innumerable shots at Christians and a steadfast determination to refuse the narrative norms of horror movies and period pieces, Haneke has once again made a film about the audience watching it. Its 144 minutes are a bold challenge to attention-span starved modern viewers. Those brave enough to jump in should fully expect to be coerced into playing Haneke's not-at-all funny mind games.

vmain13@umdbk.com

RATING: 4.5 stars out of 5