White Material (2010) - film review

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


Claire Denis returns to Africa to explore not only the white material but the black one, in a time of civil war and increased hate to colonialist Europeans provoking a widespread bloodletting and insensate pillage without distinction of the skin colour of the people victimized.  As in Denis’s other movies, the black characters - here Africans of an unnamed country - have a crucial role in the story.  The white power is defeated, not to be replaced by a better substitute.  Maria, the only white woman in the story, is not ready to give up, in spite all the warnings from friends and enemies.  The adherence of Maria to the land is so rooted, like the coffee plantation that she administers and works in.  She denies the dangers that surround her and her family.  She confesses to the wounded leader of the rebels, who advises her to leave, that she, like him, is a fighter and France, where she was advised to return to, is not the place to show courage.  But, on the other hand, in the eyes of the locals, she does not fit the country where she lives, and whose problems, in large measure, are not a far mirror of those of the global world.

As in her other films, Denis builds a complex plot, with many essential voids that the spectators must try to fill in.  The first enigmatic scenes will turn out to be the epilogue of what is presented to us as the end of the film (an open one itself), when the camera follows a rebel survivor running away, carrying the red beret of the dead leader.  The order of the events can be deciphered sometimes only with the help of apparently secondary details - the clothes of the heroine, the clearness or the darkness of the day that could sometimes, specially at the end, insinuate the chronology of the devastation of the farm.  There are some characters whose behaviour is never explained, for instance that of Maria’s father-in-law.  We will not know the destiny of the black son of André and of the mother of this son.  It is hard to distinguish between the militia of the village mayor and the army of the government, or to reconstruct what kind of relations existed between Maria and the mayor.

The racconto of Maria in the bus is simultaneous with actions she does not know and it is not easy to fix before nearly the end of the picture why, and after what events, she stops the bus and goes up to it.  Sometimes the passage from racconto to the first level of story is confusing.  The jumps of the editing, the disturbing ellipsis (one of Denis’s most used devices) match the chaos of the story where blindness, fury and folly predominate.  The violence is frequently not expressed directly, but through the gazes of the characters, their silences or, at another level, by the quick and staggering movements of the hand-held camera.  The woman toils uselessly to save a ruined farm and her stubbornness makes the situation worse.  The young rebels seem to obey no other purpose but to express their justifiable wrath, the result being a massacre.  The music, the light and shade, the mute but menacing landscape, bodies and objects scarcely presented as a whole, create an atmosphere of desolation that stay with the spectator long after the film’s projection is over.  White Material  is astonishingly dedicated "to the fearless young rascals and to Maria".

© Adam Gai (Israel) 2012

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