Although I had the best of intentions of watching all the foreign films today, I only got to one. I decided to watch The White Ribbon first because it looked creepy and I had heard really good things.

The first thing you need to know about this movie is that it’s long. 137 minutes, to be exact. Also of note, the subtitles are white. The movie is in black and white and the subtitles show up fine on the dark scenes but the outlined them in black on the lighter scenes and the words are nearly impossible to see.

That’s the bad.

On the other hand, I think I really liked the movie. I think The White Ribbon is a film you need to think on for awhile to truly form an opinion. The film, at its most basic, is about a small town in Germany just before the outbreak of WWI. Strange and horrible things start happening in the town and the children of the town always seem to be situated near the crime scenes.

The narrator lays out the goal of the film in the beginning. He suggests that telling the story of what happened in the town will help to explain some of the things that happened in Germany. It is truly a film about the seeds of fascism and cruelty being sewn into the children. It is no wonder that the town turns evil when the children are subjected to ritual punishment, sexual abuse, and are horribly repressed. The adults are all hypocrites and there is almost no one and nothing to root for in the film. However, it is an interesting look at evil and the ways in which evil is bred.

Somewhere in the midst of the film, I was reminded of the scene in Schindler’s List when the train carrying the women gets routed to Auschwitz instead of Schindler’s camp. Mila looks out the window of the train and sees a young girl near the tracks. The girl drags her finger across her throat, clearly delighting in the fact that all these women were going to die. That girl could have been any child in The White Ribbon. The spark that sent the country hurtling towards Nazism started long before the first camp was built and this movie gives a look at that spark.

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