The Village / The White Ribbon

This really is turning into a film blog, isn’t it?

With writing and producing a film being what it is lately, it’s typical that certain new releases are a tad derivative from much more influential material. Recent cases of this would be Moon and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and 500 Days of Summer and Annie Hall, among others. Although a rarity, a newer film drawing inspiration from one that's barely a few years older does happen. Such is the case with Michael Haneke’s recent The White Ribbon, which shares many artistic and dramatic similarities with M. Night Shyamalan’s underappreciated The Village.

Although comparisons between the two films are valid, with their seemingly brothers-in-spirit setting and tonality, they couldn’t be more thematically dissimilar. To fit their basic morals into a mere sentence, The Village is about how the power of love can conquer anything, so long as it’s not a solo effort (barring the social commentary). The White Ribbon, on the other hand, is not so optimistic, and is rather an exploration of the roots of a certain kind of evil. It's also very much about how sins of one generation carry on to the next, despite (or perhaps because of) the best efforts of the adults to mold their children into "good" citizens.

The Village, great film though it is, doesn’t seem too preoccupied with fleshing out its motifs with as much complexity and precision as The White Ribbon. No matter how much they ring true, the ideas in The Village are admittedly a bit…naive. But the subject matter of The White Ribbon, dates way back to the 1950s and has been explored by such directors as Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodore Dreyer. Oldness be damned, it still feels as relevant now as it did over 50 years ago. Even the most unpleasant characters in the film are given moments of humanity, and it's clear that they are all victims of - and perpetrators in - a rigid, repressive hierarchical society that dehumanizes people and codifies behavior to such an extent that deviating from the "norms" at all can only bring misery.

But maybe that’s the difference between contemporary mainstream and arthouse cinema. Or perhaps M. Night Shyamalan just has more faith in humanity than Michael Haneke. Whatever the case, both of these films work just as well separately as they do when observing just how much they have in common.