Tuesday, Dec. 08, 2009
The White Ribbon
The deserving winner of the top prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Michael Haneke's period political epic tells the lacerating saga of collective brutality and guilt in a northern German village two decades before Hitler would take power. The town is troubled by seemingly random acts of violence on animals, property and a few local children. What's happening? Who's to blame? Perhaps everyone, as we discover by following the lives of five prominent families. A kind of mashup of Our Town and Village of the Damned, the film is both draining and enthralling. Other movies don't even consider the enormity of a society's power to crush its people's best instincts. This one said: Don't look away. Look here.