The White Ribbon

There is a subtle trick in this film that may not be readily apparent because we are accustomed as cinéastes to cosmic tricks, sleights-of-hand that cover everything hitherto seen and heard with a new coat. What is the point of such chicanery if it will result in no better understanding of the world it inhabits? Ah, but it does improve understanding, although what we learn constitutes but the first link on a very long and brutal chain. 

The setting, as you may learn from any reliable summarist, is Northern Germany in the year 1913. Even superficial students of history will note that this may have been the last normal annum in Germany's existence until the reunification of its as yet uncleft halves almost eight decades later. As the film begins we do not necessarily know the date (a news item much later on will give it away), but it is obvious from the rusticity of our setting – the candlelight, the carriages, the fiefdom of the obligatorily procacious Baron (Ulrich Tukur) – that it takes place in a world long since forlorn. Our narrator is the former village teacher (Christian Friedel) who remains anonymous throughout thanks to German forms of address that allow him to be known simply as Herr Lehrer. His voiceover, however, has the cadence and irony of a much older man; we soon learn he is recollecting, perhaps with some fuzziness, the happenings of the past. Nevertheless, at the time of the "inexplicable events" our Teacher is thirty-one, soft-spoken, and charmingly awkward. He is also a lifelong bachelor although greatly enamored by the Baron's seventeen-year-old nanny Eva (Leonie Benesch), and indeed their scenes together are distinct in their tenderness. They will represent the last hope in a realm already given over to the vermin. And there is no greater rat than the village Doctor (Rainer Bock).        

As the film opens the Doctor is nearly killed tumbling off his horse; unfortunately, he will make a full recovery. Our narrator dutifully announces that what tangled the animal's legs was a thin, invisible wire that no one had ever seen before or since. The Doctor's reappearance about halfway through the film confirms a handful of unsavory suspicions, especially concerning his miserable neighbor and understrapper Ms. Wagner (Susanne Lothar). Even superficial students of German literature know better than to trust a doctor and a sidekick called Wagner, who has long since tended to all the Doctor's personal and professional needs (even, it is implied, before the death in childbirth of the Doctor's wife five years back) while raising her own mentally handicapped son Karli; that she is primarily a midwife and so referenced in the credits should tell you all you need to know. The Doctor's near-fatal accident turns out, as it were, to be but the first in a series of calamitous occurrences: a farmer's wife falls through some rotted wood in a barn attic and perishes; Sigi, the son of the Baron is abducted and savagely mistreated; the farmer's son razes an entire cabbage patch on the Baron's estate to protest his overlord's negligence; soon thereafter, the selfsame barn is burnt to the ground; and perhaps most horrifyingly, Karli is brutalized to the point of having his vision endangered. We witness only the fate of the cabbages, and only their suffering will be avenged. We also know the perpetrator in the impalement of the pastor's (Burghart Klaußner) bird, yet a very bad conscience seems to have been the only punishment inflicted.

Which brings us to another point: we may associate German wickedness with Faust and more recently with the dozen ignominious years that finally persuaded Europeans to put aside their differences, but these are not artistic implications. Karli is blinded because he alone can see the truth of his parentage but cannot speak; Sigi is injured so that his mother can escape the effete Baron, go to Italy, and find a new man (a gossipy scene mistakenly whispers that it is the Baron who was in Italy); the Doctor is viciously dismounted for trotting between familiar trees (therein could one also detect some sexual symbolism, but that is for computerized minds to ponder); and the death of the farmer's wife is remarkable in exposing the personality of her husband. Yet these crimes are neither symbolic nor factitious, as crimes so often are in fiction; instead they are real but not quite solvable, as crimes so often are in reality. This jarring disconnect with fictional conventions may lead a certain type of viewer to proclaim triumphantly that only two short decades later – the proverbial generation – Germans and fascists would become synonymous and Europe would teeter over its blackest abyss. You would not be wrong in such an assertion – the white arm-band will distinctly recur to a fascist appurtenance – but such an interpretation limits the nuances of other sidelights, and perhaps we have already said enough. 

The film's German title may be rendered as The White Ribbon: a German children's tale, and the children are a vital element, in no small part because there are so many of them that they become hard to distinguish as individuals. It is the pastor's children who are pinioned in a white ribbon arm-band to remind them of the virtues from which they have all too frequently drifted away, but the ribbons themselves rarely appear on camera. We are for many reasons invited to suspect the children of committing some if not all of the crimes, but scenes of cruelty are interspersed with touches of sweetness and innocence (the latter embodied by the pastor's youngest son). The magnificent scene in which the Doctor's son learns about the word "dead" is amazing in how logically and clearly the child proceeds from one assumption to another. Once he deduces everything he feels, quite rightly, betrayed, and we consider the first real time we as children understood that all of us would eventually have to die. But the film is not about children's mortality, nor even about their oppression in a German system that did not tolerate individualism from the young. Our village is not like other villages: most villages have their villagey ways, but this village has a tendency of being unpredictably cruel in a manner that hints at a malevolent air or curse, as if it were infiltrated with the very fumes of hell. Without giving more away, we should consider the following questions. What advantage is gained from having an old man tell the story of his youth? What advantage is derived from making the narrator a teacher who is not native to this village? What two minor details could not possibly have occurred? You may also think of how someone of some culture and intellectual curiosity would define the use of the past. I fear that last sentence might be a bit vague, but that would be in keeping with the initial effect of The White Ribbon, which upon review becomes painfully and shockingly clear like a pair of field glasses slowly capturing the face of the distant enemy. As one young character observes after traipsing over a very rickety and very dangerous bridge: "God must like me, since He did not kill me when I gave Him the chance." As if such chances were restricted by our own actions.

The Piano Teacher

Bark on, bark on, my most vigilant hounds!
Let me not rest when dark slumber abounds!
With my dreams I have reached an end,
No more time have I with sleepers to spend

                                                                    Franz Schubert, Die Winterreise

This composer, whom the titular character in this film describes in absolute terms as “ugly,” was uncompromisingly devoted to his art, perhaps in no small part because he saw little value in a material life of hedonism and wealth. Schubert's perception of an artist working night and day to achieve minor personalized goals in his lifetime that will only become global imprints well after death suggests not only a blind faith in the redemption of the soul, but also a disheartening contempt for this one life he has been given. 

This quandary – art versus life, sacrifice versus immediate gratification, profundity versus superficial banality – is as old as life and art themselves, and one that plagues Erika (the sensational Isabelle Huppert), a teacher and lover of music. Erika is extremely gifted in her field and, like so many artists, as demanding of others as she is of herself.  She is a recluse, living with her mother (Annie Girardot) and socializing with no one else, suppressing the quiet pain of having a father rotting away in an asylum (“the twilight of the mind,” she calls it), unpleasant with her students, of whom she can realistically expect little, and evasively bellicose towards her colleagues. So far, Erika fits an artistic stereotype all too well: the insufferable genius who demands perfection in everyone and everything and is left bitter by the gross negligence of a world sworn to mediocrity and passableness. There is, of course, a little more to her than that – and what exactly that little more entails has stirred up a great deal of controversy. Erika has a curiously unhinged side to her that manifests itself in pornographic and sadomasochistic whims, the likes of which have no real place in an artistic work and the reason why this film has been considered a bit of a hybrid.  No need to go into details, but suffice it to say that Erika cannot really relate to anything except her music (even her mother is just another obstacle to her routine). And her music is about endless practice, endless striving towards perfection, and the vast majority of life is spent chasing that perfection, with the possibility of attaining it seemingly just around the corner. If this description sounds like a metaphor for something else, then the second half of the film will make perfect sense.

It is precisely at the midway point of the film that she gives in to her desires for Walter (Benoît Magimel), a handsome young prodigy who also has feelings for her of a much more conventional sort. When she first plays before him, the long waits for Walter’s face to react tell you he will be a factor in the film. It is when he first plays, however, that we understand the twisted underside to Erika’s psyche: she cannot bear to look at him, not out of disgust but out of boredom. Erika, you see, has another aspect common to many artists: she is interminably bored when not engaged in her own artistic pursuits. It’s not even that nothing else matters, but that nothing else could possibly matter. But she has urges and physical lacunae that have never really been addressed, and her haplessness in that sliver of life called sexual interaction is as glaring as her art is elevated. When she hurts herself, it’s not for the trite excuse, “I hurt myself because I forgot what it was like to feel something,” but rather the “I don’t remember ever touching anything except piano keys.” At no point does Erika, who is a truly cultured and intelligent person, seem fake or conjured up from the back of some deranged and lonely mind. Yet at the same time she is also an abstraction, a piece of music that someone wrote and commanded to live, a Frankenstein sonata.  And when the film, based on a novel by this equally controversial Austrian Nobel Prize winner, asks her to live, it spirals swiftly down into a painful exchange of bruised egos and, well, bruises. 

Much has been made of the sex and violence in The Piano Teacher, directed by one of Jelinek’s most famous fellow countrymen, although it’s considerably less than the orgy of sexploitations and sexplosions scripted into your average action film. I have not read Jelinek’s novel and cannot say I am maneuvering my shelf components in anticipation of such a purchase, but the character names reveal a novelist’s touch. Walter’s last name is Klemmer, or, in German, “the one who clamps or traps,” and his first name, when pronounced in French (apart from some songs by Schubert, the film is exclusively in French but filmed in Austria with Germanic names, German street signs, and so forth) does not sound very different from “Voltaire.” Klemmer is also the surname of a famous jazz musician, whom Jelinek may have had in mind when she wrote her novel in the early 1980s, although this is debatable. More important is that another of Erika’s students is called Nápravník, who was a Czech conductor and was mentioned in this famous novel. In Czech (Jelinek is of Czech descent), nápravník is related to the words “correctional” and “corrector,” suggesting both a prison and a teacher, as Erika is certainly both. Yet Erika is not some sort of aspiring dominatrix, nor does she reflect Austrian society's alleged emphasis on discipline and excellence (you can foresee down what darksome path that leads), but a woman terrifyingly alone and closing the gap on middle age. Somehow her soul’s torment is supposed to be mitigated by a set of rather banal urges, when that is precisely her only quality that has nothing to do with art. But Huppert's performance is so outstanding that we try to battle through the film despite our repulsion. Maybe the last twenty minutes or so are best watched on fast forward; then again, perhaps there is no better way to experience Erika's slow burn than to endure what she endures down to the final frame. As one of her students sings (from Schubert's Der Wegweiser) in perfect summation:

But I have done nothing so wrong
That I should avoid the human throng.
What kind of foolish desire
Drives me tow'rd the wastelands' mire?

Caché

There is a lovely French term, bourgeois-bohème (often abbreviated as "bobo"), used to describe someone of privileged living but rebellious, often intrepid ideals, which can be taken as either a compliment or plain evidence of what happens to people when they become financially successful (an American journalist unwittingly created the same portmanteau). The whiff of money and a carefree life are often enough to corrupt those who were rotten to begin with. But for those of us with no interest in what holes money can punch through the human soul, the price is much greater. Most people will succumb to money as most people will succumb to the allure of sensuality; after all, money and sex are the two easiest things in the world to enjoy. The bobos of the world are, however, caught between what they believe in and what is expected of them given their societal status: they will be sensitive to any charges of selling out, but equally empowered by the thought of using their influence to do good instead of buying furs and patronizing boutiques. In France, a country that still reads and was awarded for its diligence with the latest Nobel Prize winner, television has all the usual farces, police shows, and imbecilic pseudo-news programs, as well as something that the United States lacks – literary debates. As pretentious as they sound and sadistically boring to viewers without a good command of both spoken and written French, these shows are a mainstay of French culture even though many of the works discussed are not worth retaining in the dark forests of our memory (as most books, given the glut of mediocrity on the market, are better left untouched). Yet the mere fact of their existence is a very bobo event: expensive television (often prime) time oddly paired with the highest form of human inquiry. How very telling, then, that the host of such a program is the subject of this remarkable film.

Our hero – if that is really the right word – is Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil), a plain French name for a plain French mind. Georges moderates a very popular literary program on television and his comfortable house in Paris's thirteenth arrondissement has wall-to-wall shelves of those wonderful Gallimard and Minuit editions so familiar to students of France. His wife Anne (a suddenly heavier Juliette Binoche) and twelve-year-old son Pierrot waft in and out of Georges's everyday routine, but his primary focus is the maintenance of his own golden reputation. This is a typically bobo concern: those who believe or once believed in bettering the world often see their success as a justification of their ideals, even if few of those ideals were preserved during their ascent. So Georges and Anne engage in their habitual dinner polemics with their guests – including one friend, Pierre (the late Daniel Duval), who clearly has eyes for Anne – until a strange package arrives. As is common for strange packages there is no return address, nor any clear indication of how it might have arrived on the Laurents' doorstep. Such an event is all the more disconcerting since the package only contains a cassette, and that cassette contains nothing but handheld footage of the house at whose doorstep it was left. Georges is visibly disturbed; Anne thinks one of Georges's loyal viewers has decided to stalk him; Pierrot is nowhere to be found; and nothing more is said until, of course, a second package with more footage appears a few days later. This time we get more information: a child's drawing of a stick figure spitting out what really does look like blood. Anne is confused and now suspects a prank; Georges, however, is terrified. 

Childhood memories swirl and descend upon Georges like some serpentine mist and we begin to peer into his nightmares. He is perhaps six or seven with another boy his age, a boy from North Africa, a boy by the name of Majid. Majid's parents, we learn in snippets, were Algerian farmhands working for the Laurents when they were slain during this notorious Paris massacre. As a last favor, Majid was to be adopted by his parents' employers – something to which Georges, apparently obsessed with his reputation from an early age, was vehemently opposed. What happened then is revealed towards the end of the film, but Georges feels impelled enough by his conscience to track down Majid in his rent-controlled apartment and confront him about the matter. Majid denies any involvement, Georges leaves, and, soon enough, his nightmares become more visceral. A young Majid is now seen spitting blood and beheading a rooster, and in general doing everything he can to seem unadoptable, which makes about as much sense as Georges's claims to Anne that nothing is bothering him and he has taken no action on the tapes. It is here that Georges's true personality emerges. He crosses a street without looking and almost collides with a West African speeding along on his bicycle. Instead of acknowledging their mutual insouciance, perhaps more on his part as the pedestrian, Georges fulminates against this young immigrant who he feels does not belong in his world. Another tape appears and the secret is out: it is a film of Georges and Majid in Majid's apartment. Anne demands details and Georges provides the story of Majid's parents, his threats against Georges, and his eventual placement in an orphanage, all of which doesn't persuade Anne and shouldn't persuade us. Pierrot suddenly goes missing and Georges returns to Majid's apartment to accuse him of kidnapping. How perfect that as Georges's only son vanishes, we finally see Majid's child. A handsome, well-raised, and extremely polite young man, he harbors more than a little resentment towards Georges. Father and son both claim that Georges is way off base even as the son seems to be hiding behind a smirk; Pierrot returns the next day and says he spent the night at a friend's, although his parents never quite ask which friend; then Majid beckons Georges to visit him one last time. And perhaps we should stop our revelations right there.

The brilliance of Caché (for which this earlier Haneke film serves as a study) lies in the confluence of its details and human intentions. Georges and Majid do represent two strands of society, the affluent native (Auteuil, ironically enough, was actually born in Algiers) and struggling immigrant whose only viable chance of advancement resides in his children; Majid's son is a proud North African yet completely French; and the times when Georges could cross a Parisian street and not encounter an immigrant on the other side are long gone. As a survey of what has become of our globalized world the film remains insightful, correct, and admonitory – yet this is all of secondary importance. Its true beauty is reflected in Georges's eyes, the portals to his soul and conscience, portals which his mother (Anne Girardot) knows have not always been the upholders of the ideals he now espouses. Is it a coincidence that, as every review will inform you, caché is French for "hidden"? Or that, in Arabic, Majid means "glorious" or "exalted"? Two highly controversial final scenes that will be discussed for years might suggest otherwise. But then again, only Georges can tell us for sure.