The White Book

I knew pretty early on in The White Book that the movie would make my bottom 10. There’s exactly one positive about the film. And that is that it made me think more positively of almost every single movie I’d ever seen. This movie is so bad that it made me respect cinema as a genre more, with the notable exception of The White Book, which reconstructed my conceptualization of what a truly terrible film looks like.

The film is pseudo-pretentious bullshit. There is a plot, but it’s not important. The lead character is a woman named Sophie. Sophie is nearly the only voice you hear in the film as it’s pretty much entirely a voice-over monologue on only vaguely connected events. Sophie is at a new phase in her life. She’s left her husband for her female lover. Now, Sophie is in a new place and she’s painting the walls white and it’s like, a metaphor for new beginnings. But much of her monologue and the events of this film don’t deal with that. It’s more just what one could generously call “meditations” on life and various topics.

Because a bad “art” film, it’s hard to know what to talk about with The White Book. The plot is only vaguely important. Usually, an art film or cinematic meditation or whatever you call it would at least have visual themes, if not traditional narrative. This is not the case in The White Book. Unless you count nudity filmed in black and white as a visual theme. See? The naked woman riding a bike is a metaphor for how the director is attracted to women. Very deep! It really feels like director Weiping Kagen saw some artistic French erotic cinema and tried to imitate it. Kagen lacks any solid story idea. Nor do they understand the themes of what they’re imitating. Instead, the abjectly bullshit pretension is just a cover so they can film a nude, sexualized woman and still claim that the movie is artistically intelligent. It isn’t.

The “erotic” element certainly exists in the film. But somehow, the film even fails here. This is a deeply unsexy film. And not because lead actress Sophie Reinhart is bad to look at naked or anything. But my main thought upon seeing her ride a bike naked is how uncomfortable and awkward it would be to do so. Plus, even if you want to watch a movie just to see some boobs, you’ve gotta sit through this pretentious tedium in between such scenes. Over an hour through the film, there’s a sex scene that looks so real I think it might be unsimulated. Which is notable, one way or the other. But at that point, the movie had sapped me of any sort of emotion so I didn’t even care about that.

On top of everything else, English doesn’t seem to be the first language of the director nor lead actress. Some of the full-movie voice over loses what little poetry it has because of a poor turn or phrase. But it’s most visible in the section where Sophie talks frankly about sex. This section has such notable phrases such as “sucking vagina” and “making sex.” I don’t want to be too unkind to lead actress Sophie Reinhart as the failures of this movie are not on her. But the ability to perform voiceover narration for an hour and a half is beyond her capabilities as an actress.

This is one of the most pointless movie I’ve ever seen. And not in a cool, intentional nihilistic way. Even other movies I hated I could at least understood why they existed. 69+1 was a cash-grab male gaze comedy. Night Fangs was a cash-grab male gaze horror film. These aren’t great reasons to exist, but at least they’re reasons. The White Book is one of a half dozen films from the same director and starring the same actress available on the Tubi LGBT section. Whatever motivation Kagen had for these projects, it wasn’t artistic. Because you know what really would make pretentious art films work? If you cranked 6 of them out in a year, assembly line style. I also fail to see how any of these work as a cash-grab. And if Kagen just wanted to film porn, I don’t understand why they didn’t just do that.

I sometimes question which is the worst sin for a movie: if it bores me, or if it angers me. This is not something I had to debate with The White Book, because it did both. The only reason The White Book isn’t taking the spot as the worst WLW movie I’ve ever seen is because The Final Girl is thematically extremely similar but has worse cinematography. But let me assure you, The White Book is pure awful. This movie goes so far beyond the idea of recommending or not recommending a film. It’s in a different category; a challenge. The only way anyone should watch this film is as a dare or test of endurance. So, go on. Find the movie on Tubi and try and sit through each excruciating minute of its hour and a half run time. I dare you.

Overall rating: 1.4/10

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