The White Ribbon (Spoiler)

I don't know how many have seen this movie.   I had seen the previews which did not entice me to see it, but finding it at the library I decided to overcome a certain dislike for it since it had won so many awards. It is called The White Ribbon.  The title comes from a form of punishment that a very rigid pastor hoists upon his children to insure that they lead virtuous and ideal lives.  The old story of preacher kids comes to mind.

The movie begins with a doctor returning home to get pitched off his horse when he hits a wire. He is hospitalized and we then meet the small village which belongs to a Baron and Baroness who have three children, twins, and a young boy named Sigi. Sigi is a beautiful child but suffers from boredom trying to satisfy his demanding mother.  The villagers are who the story is about but Sigi does have an important role in the film. 

The narrator of the story is the teacher who is a son of a tailor.  He is 31 years old, single, and a simple, kind, naive type of man who falls in love with a young 17 year old girl who is the nanny for the Baron and Baronness's children. 

This is not  a happy movie. It is a sad movie full of malice, emptiness, disdain, cruelty, envy, nearly all the sins that one can empty onto a piece of Hollywood celluloid. The writer outdid himself using a Conan O'Brien look alike to portray the cruel mean doctor who in the beginning of the film is so readily taken out.  Later, we learn his evil secret which may be a clue to who it is that did string the wire to trip him up, saving his own daughter the misery that he has inflicted onto her.  In the meantime, his wife has died so that he takes up with the midwife who is his children's caretaker, and who he secretly hates but uses to satisfy his lusts.  There is an especially dreadful scene where he berates her sadistically so that she squeals on his dreadful deeds to his daughter which she has seen him do.

Two young children get tortured, the midwife's son who is a sweet and innocent retarded child, and the son of the Baron and Baroness, Sigi.  Both are tortured cruelly, and the culprit frankly is never found, but there are significant clues as to who may have done the dreadful deeds.

A woman is killed sensely while working the Baron's fields so that her son goes berserk, using his scythe to take his vengeance out on cabbage heads, cutting them down in a rage.  This costs his father and his family much humiliation and finally loss of jobs and then loss of life.  The father hangs himself.

Isn't this just the happiest film you have ever seen get an award? Ha!

But throughout the film, there is sweet innocence, stark cruelty, as the children are portrayed as both good, sweet, and evil. One of the pastor's daughters mercilessly kills a caged bird to put it on her father's desk.  The pastor is a man who one must question at times for his authoritarian and punitive way of teaching the Gospel.  Old time religion seems to often be the worst kind of teaching, and in this case, it most certainly is. He has his son who is exhibiting signs of masturbating secretly tied down while in bed so that he can overcome the temptations to touch himself.

It is one of those films that because it exposes life so well in this harsh and unforgiving environment that it garnered awards from the world of film. 

I was shocked, stunned, and amazed at the rawness of the film.  We see the tortured child, and know through his agony who may have committed this horrible act of trying to blind him.  He flees town so we are fairly certain that he is the guilty culprit.  However, whoever it was who had Sigi tied upside down and caned is never fully known...

In the end, World War I is about to begin because some anarchist has killed the King of Austria. 

The narrator, the teacher, does find love and happiness in his shy young nanny who has gotten fired from her job because of the torture to Sigi.  Unfair, but nothing is fair in this film.  Her father who demanded that he wait a year does come to the village to inspect the teacher's habitat so that the two can become married.  He is drafted into the army but survives and life goes on...probably as sourly after the war as before.

This is a movie that is intended to expose daily life in German villages.  It is ironic that it is called The White Ribbon.  Lord knows these krauts are as sour as sauerkraut.