When very bad directors imitate very great ones, the effect can swing  from hilarity (Steven Spielberg counterfeiting Stanley Kubrick in A.I.) and desecration (Brian dePalma degrading Alfred Hitchcock in “Obsession”) to class-project mediocrity (Walter Hill studiously copying Sam Peckinpah in “The Long Riders” and sneaky underhanded rip-off (Jim Jarmusch unofficially re-making Jean Renoir’s “Grand Illusion” with “Down By Law.”)  “The White Ribbon” is such a perfect copy of Carl Dreyer’s films that it is destroyed from the beginning merely by the comparisons it invites.

In his portrait of Germany’s devilish children on the eve of the first world war, writer/director Michael Henke is drawn to the quiet darkness of the Dreyer universe, but blind to the spiritual light illuminating it.  The white ribbon, worn as a punishment by those children who cannot keep evil at bay by any other means, is a mockery of the innocence it supposedly represents, just as Henke’s ancient black and white contrasts mock the images he so slavishly imitates.

The tale is told through the recollections of a schoolteacher whose courtship of a shy young tutor  coincided with the wiretripping of a doctor, the burning of a barn, an assault against a young girl, and the near-blinding of a retarded boy.  The schoolteacher and his fiancé are the only decent people in the village, but so thickly homely as to elude audience sympathy. Henke must have wanted it this way, perhaps in rebellion against the nonsensical belief that purity can be justly represented by physical beauty.

His best scene is also the ugliest.  The doctor, who we later discover is in the habit of sexually tormenting his daughter, has returned from the hospital and resumed his sordid couplings with the midwife who cares for him and the children.  No longer able to restrain his disgust for her flabby ugliness and bad breath, he unleashes a tyrannical invective of rejection against her very existence.

Hateful a film as “The White Ribbon” may be,  Henke cannot, unlike the directors of “The Lives of Others” and “The Counterfeiters,” be accused of being a Nazi apologist.  At the end of the film, it is easy to imagine the horrible children in this rotten German village heartily embracing the Nazi party in twenty years time.  What Henke conveniently overlooks, however, is that it took more than one  creepy village to spawn the Third Reich.  The guilt for that abomination rests on the the whole of Germany.  

The PostGlobe relies on your donations. Please support this writer’s work by going to our donate page and let us know where you’d like your donation to go.