White Material (2010)

White Material is a French film first released in 2010, directed by Claire Denis.  The film stars Isabelle Huppert, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Isaach De Bankolé, William Nadylam and Christopher Lambert.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Somewhere in Africa, in a region plagued by civil war, Maria refuses to abandon her coffee plantation before the end of the harvest.  Most of her regular workers have deserted her and finding men to replace them appears to be impossible.  But Maria persists, seemingly oblivious to the dangers which threaten to engulf her and her family...

With her most recent film, a powerfully rendered evocation of the collapse of colonialism in Africa, director Claire Denis shows a remarkable return to form and leaves us in no doubt that she is still very much a force to be reckoned with.  In recent years, critical opinion has generally turned against this most fiercely independent of filmmakers who was once hailed as one of French cinema’s great auteurs.  Certainly, since her masterful Beau travail (1999), Denis’ work has lost some of its impact and she has looked increasingly like a director who is more preoccupied with experimenting with form and style for her own amusement than in making films for a cinema audience.  Not so with this latest offering.  

White Material is Claire Denis at her best, a visually stunning and emotionally intense work that virtually explodes off the screen, such is the power of the story it tells and the brilliance of its mise-en-scène.  The film is relentlessly tense and forbidding, portraying a world that is on the point of collapsing into anarchy, with characters living on a knife-edge, oblivious to (or unwilling to accept) the danger that is poised to carry them off.  Yet, despite the bleakness of its subject, the film also possesses a haunting lyrical quality, nourished by the beauty of the African setting, that makes it apparent just why the white protagonists are so reluctant to leave their country.  The contradictions which underpin the narrative (reflecting the author’s own ambivalence towards colonialism) echo those that we found in Denis’ first film, Chocolat (1988), which is also set in Africa and treads similar ground.

Denis’ casting of Isabelle Huppert in the lead role was always going to be controversial, since Huppert had played a very similar character in another recent colonialism-themed film, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (2009).  As similar as these two films are, the character that Huppert portrays in White Material is somewhat more complex and ambiguous, and a much more suitable role for an actress of Huppert’s calibre.  What makes her particularly well-suited for the role she plays in this film (a headstrong and independent plantation owner) is her ability to subtly reveal her inner feelings, creating an apparent disconnect between what she appears to be on the surface and what she is really experiencing, deep down.  When the emotions do break free and come rushing to the surface, we can have no doubt that these are real emotions, keenly felt, and with a sharp visceral edge.

The supporting characters are also much more interesting than those in Rithy Panh’s film, and far more convincingly portrayed by a talented pool of actors: Christophe Lambert, Isaach de Bankolé, Michel Subor and Nicolas Duvauchelle.  The very qualities that are missing from Un Barrage contre le Pacifique - passion, vitality and a real sense off emotional conflict - are to be found in abundance in White Material, thanks largely to the contributions from its superlative cast.

There is a searing tragic quality to this film which is hard to express but which is inescapably felt by anyone who watches it.  The film appears to take an anti-colonialist stance and yet we cannot help sympathising more with the white settlers than with the black natives.  Should we rejoice in the passing of colonialism or not?  With some irony, Claire Denis reminds us that we can never take an objective view of history.

© James Travers 2010

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