the white ribbon

This film picked up the Palme d’Or at Cannes earlier in the year and, with Moira spending yesterday shopping in Birmingham with Alice, I thought I’d take the opportunity to take another trip to the Watershed. Michael Haneke’s highly-acclaimed film (I think it’s probably a masterpiece) is set in a small farming village in northern Germany on the eve of the First World War. It’s a brilliant and disturbing film and what at first appears to be a rather docile community slowly reveals itself to be a dysfunctional society, “plagued with anonymous, retaliatory acts of malice and spite” (as aptly described by Peter Bradshaw in his Guardian Review). The film is a beautifully-crafted, slow-burning mystery from beginning to end but, frustratingly for all of who watched it yesterday afternoon, the mystery was somewhat emphasised by a glitch in the sub-titles over the last 10 minutes!! By then, I just KNEW that the film would leave us “all in the air”, but it would have been good to know what the narrator was saying over those final minutes as the director panned around a bleak German landscape. I think the Watershed intend offering a refund but, frankly, I’d be far more interested in seeing a transcript of the final ten minutes’ commentary (in English please)!
PS: it’s quite a long film – nearly two-and-a-half hours – and I was pretty amazed that not a single person in the large audience needed to spend a penny in that time!