The director shot very hard, basically to win the award, and he also touched the G-spot of the Palme d'Or, and got his wish to win Cannes. But I really don't think this is a good movie. I just watched it last night and thought so, and I still think so after I slept.
1. It has only one answer
not to the question of who did it, who tripped the doctor's horse, who broke the baron's land, hurt Sigi and Kalli, and midwife and where did the doctor go. In such a small town full of terrorism, anyone can do these things, and the lines between good and evil, right and wrong could have been blurred and explored more deeply. But the director hinted at the end that the children did it, which I think is a failure. This could have been a more open and in-depth story. However, such a good story loses this layer of openness and depth, which is related to the director's own consciousness.
What I want to see is how a director asks and reflects during the storytelling process, instead of setting questions, answers, and central ideas before telling the story. I think the former is the master, such as Tarkovsky's treatment of poetry, memory and hometown in the film, Gieselov's treatment of ethics, and Bergman's treatment of God's exploration and reflection. A director like that doesn't underestimate the intelligence of the viewer, throws hints at every turn, and doesn't force the viewer to accept the only answer.
It's a pity that "White Ribbon" has a beautiful story structure, but because of the director's own limitations, it has not been able to create a truly thought-provoking work. In the end, it can only be a seemingly masterpiece, but it is actually a poor imitation of the masterpiece.
The proposition of "White Ribbon" is a reflection on the German nation. This is expressed in a voice-over at the beginning of the film: maybe what happened in this village can give us an idea of what is going on in this country. But just as the voiceover expresses the central idea too early, the director is also too persistent in making the story completely revolve around the answers he has set, so that the story loses its own life and can only have one interpretation .
Watching such a movie is like walking through a seemingly complicated maze. However, signs are marked at every important corner. Well-trained people are very good at following these signs, so they successfully walked out of the maze and gained intelligence. The thrill of rising.
There are too many symbols like this in "White Ribbon", the black and white images, the slow shots, the long stares, and the credits played without accompaniment at the end... The story is piled up with these symbols and seems to be complicated maze. In fact, these symbols have been defined by the director for a long time, so that our viewing experience becomes a formula for deriving an answer. This makes some people have the pleasure of intellectual improvement, and some people will have the pain of being raped.
2. What's worse, your answer is not mine. The
director originally wanted to add an ethnographic-like annotation to a grand proposition, using the story of an ordinary German village to understand what happened at the national/ethnic level . But this Freudian answer is really superficial and misleading. For example, the sexual metaphors in the story, the suppressed sex of teenagers, the incestuous sex of doctors, and the baroness’s desire for freedom and love, the director simply dealt with these supposedly more complex interpersonal relationships, directly pointing to violence and evil, and then Refers violence at the family level to violence at the social/state level. Such simple linear thinking really ignores the complexity and multiple expressions of human nature. There are too many metaphors and derivations like this in the film, so that the whole story can only be a symbolic allegory, and the moral is still unique.
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