Despite winning the coveted Palme d’Or top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon,” was probably seen as a contentious winner, as critical reception for the fil when it bowed out last week at the Croisette was decidedly mixed. It’s a film we and our correspondent, unfortunately missed, but hey, gotta have something to look forward to in the year.
Isabelle Huppert the jury head of the 62 annual film festival — who’s always suffered from a frosty reputation — starred in Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher” in 2001, and some have already subtly (or not-so-subtly) suggested she held bias towards the film noting she was “visibly delighted,” when the director was given his award. We too heard the rumors that the jury deliberations were fractious (so did everyone in attendance at Cannes, frankly), and Variety says one jury member called her, a fascist.” They also wrote that onstage during the awards ceremony she looked “visibly tense,” and spoke of “an unforgettable week” and “several hours, uh, several moments of deliberation.”
Another juror told Variety anonymously that “it [was] the worst jury experience he’d ever had.” Since there was only four male jurors, that was either Nuri Bilge Ceylan (“Three Monkeys”), South Korean director Lee Chang-dong, screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, or American filmmaker James Gray.
The New York Times said the film was meat with “smattering of boos” when it first screened. “A two-and-a-half hour, slow-to-boil compendium of cruelty set in Germany right before World War I, the sumptuously photographed movie was met by its first press audience Wednesday with applause and a smattering of boos. The new movie centers on a series of increasingly violent incidents that beset a hamlet in the grip of several harsh patriarchs, including the baron whose land sustains the locals financially and the pastor whose sermons are meant to sustain the populace spiritually…. it lacks the intellectual and emotional nuance that would make this largely joyless world come to life.”
“You could call Ribbon is a bit stern and frosty,” wrote Jeffrey Wells, “but it’s got a river running through it that contrasts with the utter lack of an undercurrent in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds.’ It’s basically about subliminal class hatred and antagonism between the working stiffs and the rich. You can feel Bolshevism just around the corner in a land to the east, and the disregard and contempt that the haves show the have-nots to this day.”
“Haneke is not a perpetrator of cruelty but a prosecutor of it; and ‘The White Ribbon,’ constructed step by meticulous step, scene by forbidding, foreboding scene, is his grandest indictment of intolerance,” wrote Time’s Richard Corliss.
Mike D’Angelo writing for the A/V Club, whose writing we enjoyed all week, remarked on how typically dour the film felt from the get-go and gave it a C-grade and called it, “a big arty dose of castor oil.” “[It] announces itself as a long haul right from its ultra-austere, respect-my-authority opening credits: white letters, black screen, complete silence. Three minutes of that and you start feeling like you should open up your desk and pull out your notebook, and the lengthy (2.5 hours), deliberate black-and-white period piece that follows does nothing to stave off the sense that your knuckles might be rapped at any moment.”
Variety loved some of it, but felt that some of it was like a long haul. “Immaculately crafted in beautiful black-and-white and entirely absorbing through its longish running time, Michael Haneke’s ‘The White Ribbon’ nonetheless proves a difficult film to entirely embrace.
Indiewire notes some of the more brutal moments of the film happen off-screen. “Absence in ‘The White Ribbon’ is the quality that makes it a harrowing work of art, rather than a historical soap opera.”
THR also seems to admire certain elements of the film, but also hints it might be a hard-road for audiences that aren’t already Haneke devotees. “It’s a superb cinematic work and an appropriately serious one, given its subject matter and its intentions. Still, its stately pace and its purposely de-dramatized scenes may keep it from attaining the boxoffice figures of the director’s previous, perhaps flashier forays in the U.S. and European markets. What will help in the States is SPC’s wise decision to release it with its extensive voiceover spoken in English.”
A mixed bag of thoughts to be sure. Still, even when Haneke fails (see the American remake of “Funny Games”) he still delivers thought-provoking pictures. And we and some of his other constituents will surely be in line come opening day whenever that is (again, Sony Pictures Classics, will surely release it before the Fall Academy Award deadline for Foreign Film applications). Though unlike say, “Antichrist,” Haneke’s audience is smaller then Lars Von Trier’s followers, who will surely turn up at his contentious picture just to see what all the fuss was about, regardless if some panned it.
