So I was really excited to watch Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon) last night at the Embarcadero Theatre. I remember seeing a preview for it at the Piedmont Theatre (I think) several months back and it intrigued me. Friday morning, Benutty texted me that we should see it right at the same moment that I was reading Roger Ebert’s review of it and I knew it was destiny. I only read the first paragraph of his review because I didn’t want to come into the theatre with someone else’s interpretation in my head.

From Ebert’s first paragraph in the review, I knew several things:

  1. There was a village.
  2. “Accidents” in quotes were occurring in the village.
  3. There’s a question as to what was happening in the village. Was it an evil force, one single person? What was it? That was the question.
  4. Then, a child in the village was murdered.

These were the only four things I knew from the review. Misha was excited to see it too. I told him about what I had read and he thought it sounded creepy and wanted to see it. We arrived alongside Benutty and Nick to the theatre for the 8pm showing.

Within seconds of the black and white film rolling, items 1, 2 and 3 were immediately evident. And so Misha and I waited for #4. When is one of the many schoolchildren in the film going to get murdered?? How intriguing.

And we waited. We saw a doctor break his collarbone. We saw the wooings of a schoolmaster. We saw a barn burn down, a farmer’s wife die, a farmer suicide, the mutilation of cabbage, incest and the lashing of poor little Sigi. And we waited.

We waited for a murder. Karli, the village “retarded boy” (as the children called him) was attacked and certainly came close to death. The images of the boy after the attack, though not necessarily gory, certainly shocked the audience and myself. I was stunned and mortified. But Karli wasn’t murdered–he survived his attack. Near-murder, yes; actual murder, no.

It seems that the murder Ebert speaks of never manifested. Did I miss something? Or did Ebert miss something? Ebert knows way more than I could ever know about films and I obviously respect his prowess but somewhere along the way Ebert and I were watching two different films. Ebert saw the film at the Cannes festival. Did director Michael Haneke distribute the film with alternate endings? Could the US audiences not handle a boy with Down’s Syndrome getting murdered? What gives?

Certainly, the film ends with a number of open-ended questions but for me the biggest question I had as the credits rolled was “When is one of those damn kids going to get murdered?”