The White Ribbon
Although director Michael Haneke claimed, “There’s almost never violence in my films that are depicted on screen,” it certainly seems like the opposite is true. The Austrian director has made audiences cringe with films like “Funny Games” and “Caché,” and now returns to the screen with his Palme D’Or-winning thriller, “The White Ribbon.”
While the film is set in a German Protestant village at the eve of World War I, Haneke said, “I don’t think the film is that much about German fascism, rather it uses the social-historical context to examine, rather, the broader question of how people can be made … to follow the ideology.” In the village, an imbalance of power between the children and their fathers is thrown into chaos when a series of random violent events occur with no culprit in sight.
The film is shot in a gorgeous black and white, made possible through digital photography. “One of the reasons I made the choice to use black and white [is] because we know this period from the numerous black and white photographs that we’ve seen,” Haneke said. He cited August Sander as a reference point.
But when making films that examine the nature of violence, it is difficult to find children who can perform some roles. “A child doesn’t have to understand the entire film in order to shoot a specific scene,” Haneke said of his technique. “All that’s required is that you explain what the scene is about and that’s something they can identity with … I’m not sure even when I’m working with adult actors whether they understand the material.”
Like most of Haneke’s films, “The White Ribbon” is cold and brutal—instead of crawling under the skin, it twists the mind. Scenes play out in a very astute manner, as Haneke meticulously controls each little detail. While the plot keeps the audience searching for answers, the greater themes of fascism and religious ideology ask greater questions about the nature of violence in the current world.
Haneke keeps the viewer distanced from the emotional core, and leaves open-ended questions that will frustrate some, but fascinate many. When prodded about some direct answers to the end of the film, Haneke gave a coy answer, “I think there is a rational explanation for each or every act that takes place in the film, but it’s certainly not to me to point those out.”
“The White Ribbon” opens Dec. 30.
Police, Adjective
Watching the new Romanian film “Police, Adjective,” it is hard to believe that writer and director Corneliu Porumboiu was influenced by a TV show like “NYPD.”
The film follows a police officer named Cristi in a small town who is assigned to spy on a drug dealer. When he discovers that the dealer is a high school punk, he wants to drop the case. The case becomes complicated when Cristi’s boss argues the importance of words to him in a surprisingly hilarious climax. For Porumboiu, the film is “about sense and meanings of the words, and the inner words.”
The director showed the film at the New York Film Festival, and at a press conference explained that a similar case had happened to a friend in the police, “He told me a story about a small case when he didn’t want to arrest him because he didn’t want it on his conscience.”
Like many of the other films of the Romanian New Wave, such as “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days,” “Police, Adjective” is a procedural in the literal sense—Cristi eats breakfast, walks, and sits outside for hours on end. Porumboiu leaves his audience in suspense by editing as little as possible. “All the time I was thinking about shots like that,” he said.
Porumboiu thought that the film’s editing should not be as much about a reflection of the case as about the question how movies work. “I thought that this is the rhythm I should follow up,” he said. “It’s a question about cinema. I was thinking about the tools of cinema.”
Porumboiu’s research for the film was not based on studying classic movies or the law, but on asking his friends in the police about their own experiences, making the movie more relatable for Romanian audiences. Porumboiu acknowledged that “this type of movie doesn’t have access to the people like Hollywood movies.”
“Police, Adjective,” with its neorealist pace and strikingly deadpan humor is truly another gem of the Romanian New Wave, but Porumboiu is careful when using that term. While he described his other fellow directors as “brothers,” he declared that each of them will mark their own territory—“Each one of us is on our second feature. The movies we will make [later] will be quite different.”
“Police, Adjective” opens Dec. 23.
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