The White Ribbon 2009
The White Ribbon 2009
Das weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (original title)
R | 2h 24min | Drama, History, Mystery | 5 March 2010 (USA)
Storyline:
From July, 1913 to the outbreak of World War I, a series of incidents take place in a German village. A horse trips on a wire and throws the rider; a woman falls to her death through rotted planks; the local baron’s son is hung upside down in a mill; parents slap and bully their children; a man is cruel to his long-suffering lover; another sexually abuses his daughter. People disappear. A callow teacher, who courts a nanny in the baron’s household, narrates the story and tries to investigate the connections among these accidents and crimes. What is foreshadowed? Are the children holy innocents? God may be in His heaven, but all is not right with the world; the center cannot hold.
Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)
Rated R for some disturbing content involving violence and sexuality
Parents Guide: [spoiler title=”View content advisory”]Though there is no nudity, there are depictions of sex acts that have just ended or have been interrupted. There are also brief descriptions of sex acts made in confrontations between characters.
Thinking that his son masturbates, a pastor tells him that if he continues to do so he will die a horrible death. Later, the son’s hands are strapped to his bed at night to prevent him from masturbating.
A doctor is in an incestuous relationship with his teenage daughter. In one scene, a woman taunts the man by telling him that she knows of him ‘fingering’ his daughter. In another scene, the father and daughter are caught in an examining room, both fully clothed though the daughter’s nightgown is hiked up her legs. A moan is heard by the son outside the door before they are caught.
A brief scene of fully clothed intercourse. Thrusting and moaning are present.
Another very brief scene of a woman performing a sex act (blowjob) on a man.[/spoiler]
User review:
Few film auteurs can match the consistency of Michael Haneke, and once again the Austrian filmmaker has come up trumps with an exquisite and brooding mediation on repression, tradition and the sins of the father.
Shot in stunning black and white, the film chronicles a series of mysterious events in a town leading up to the outbreak of WWI. The pace is slow and thoughtful, and the film is reference to August Sander while being a respectful throwback to the German expressionists whose work would come out of the horrors the film’s narrative seems to foreshadow.
The hallmarks of Haneke’s body of work are all there – elegiac tone, clinical editing, wincingly frank dialogue – but in many ways The White Ribbon stands alone in the canon. It is a challenging work that will polarise audiences but represents a breathtaking new wave not just in the director’s career but in European cinema.
Some might say the film’s inherent flaw is that there is no-one to root for, but this is perhaps its key strength. It’s certainly plausible that this is Haneke’s intention: he wants to position us as mute outsiders to a slowly creeping menace, unable to have a say in the invisible horrors that await us. The result is a deadening and thoroughly rewarding experience – a combination few filmmakers could hope to achieve.
Director: Michael Haneke
Writers: Michael Haneke, Michael Haneke (story)
Stars: Christian Friedel, Ernst Jacobi, Leonie Benesch
Country: Germany | Austria | France | Italy | Canada
Language: German | Italian | Polish
Release Date: 5 March 2010 (USA)
Also Known As: The White Ribbon
Filming Locations: Evangelical Church, Netzow, Plattenburg, Brandenburg, Germany
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1149362/
Format : MPEG-4
Format profile : Base Media
Codec ID : isom (isom/iso2/avc1/mp41)
File size : 2.74 GiB
Duration : 2 h 23 min
Overall bit rate : 2 730 kb/s
Any chance this can be re-upped?
ty