White Material

White Material is a film about a coffee plantation in an unnamed African country (shot in Cameroon). Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) runs the place for her father Henri (Michel Subor). She has a layabout son called Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle) and a weak-willed husband André (played by Christopher Lambert of Highlander fame).

The French army is withdrawing and the country is fractured into regular army, rebels, and newly-formed mad-dog local militias out for rape and pillage, sprung from the ground once law and order dissolves, like Ray Harryhausen's skeleton warriors of the dragon's teeth (Jason and the Argonauts).

It's time to banish the White Material, that is white folk and the trappings of white living. Maria doesn't want to know though and stays on stubbornly trying to process her coffee crop.

The film is quite pretty and captures the feel of Africa on the ground, of the isolation and the wild beauty, but also the extreme lurking danger. Denis has roots in Africa and so manages a lot of authenticity. The dialogue is occasionally awesome, soliloquies in which Maria curses whites and talks about Africa in relation to Europe particularly stand out.

Unfortunately I think there are weak elements, Lambert isn't good enough and his character isn't even necessary (which goes for Henri too), Maria does something brutal and inexplicable at the end (in true clichéd Huppert style), and the film looks like it took a severe amount of cutting as there are plot threads that are barely picked up. The film has the feel of an overly condensed epic. The biggest problem though maybe the narrative structure, where the end occurs at the beginning, which in all frankness, and with due respect to a director who has entertained me with great films more than once, comes off as amateurish.

As usual the Tindersticks provide a wonderful soundtrack for Denis, so important for an auteur to have a proper musical collaborator, but they basically paper over the cracks.

The film is good enough if you just look at is as mesmerising anarchy, but it's not a multi-faceted Denis masterpiece. Isaach De Bankolé is underused as Le Boxeur, the rebel hero general, he's a symbol of a strong moral Africa, gut-shot and dying alone. This character lingers in the memory.

The strengths: The colors are glorious and the cinematography is extremely direct, yet immaculately composed. I could practically feel the dirt between my toes as I was watching it; this being my second Denis film I've seen, I really can see a sensual theme to her direction! As with Beau Travail, the way the film portrayed the male body and African culture was really authentic and aesthetically pleasing. The acting is very genuine and believable, and the atmosphere is lovely. With every facial gesture Huppert made, I felt she was truly her character, determined and plodding. The score is muted, yet I would say it is *perfect*, with just the right level of mystery and ominous tension. The pacing is unique in how non-linear it is, but never lets up the intrigue. I myself did not have a hard time understanding which was a flashback or not. But on the topic of this, now we segway into the negatives, which unfortunately make this could've-been-great film a little lacking!

Negatives: The aforementioned jumbled pacing kind of kills the forward motion that the film tries to build up as it's main driving force. In the middle of a great montage it can cut back to her on the bus, in the present. I love how this film respects the audience's intelligence and doesn't announce the flashbacks at all, but the repetition and level to which it does it obscures clarity and drags the film down! However, the Achilles heel that shatters a could-be-perfect film is an unfortunately very, very prominent lack of any characterization. Everyone seems stilted and one dimensional, even Maria at most times! To relate to any of these characters, I'm not asking to be spoonfed any excessive exposition, but any would be nice. Is Manuel lazy or mentally unwell? Why does he shave his head and go off the rails, what broke inside him in the fields? Why did Andre divorce Maria? Why is Maria so attached to her plantation? Why does she dream of the Boxer? The reason I found the ending so frustrating wasn't because it wasn't the outcome I was looking for (although it wasn't). It was because it didn't make sense because I didn't have any feel of her character's emotions or motivations. In Beau Travail, the ending is similarly sad and disturbing. But somewhere in that more effective film, between the layers of obliqueness, the subtext can carry you through to the final conclusion and you can lay back and think as to how and why we got here. With all the strengths and beautiful qualities White Material embodies, I don't think we got to that point of knowledge or fulfillment.

Denis returns to Afriaca -- an undefined country there -- to explore colonialism and revolution in this film that has more in common with her wonderfully mysterious 'The Intruder' (2004) -- though it's less successful -- than with her warm-hearted family story '35 Shots of Rum' (2008).

At the center here too is a family, the Vials, French colonial types who own a coffee plantation, or did own one. And at the center of this family is the scrawny, determined Maria (Isabelle Huppert), as brave as she is heedless. Everything is falling apart, but she simply won't give up -- or even acknowledge that there's any danger.

But here, as in various African countries, government forces are at war with rebels and schools are closing and children are turning into dangerous, thrill-seeking warriors popping pills and wielding pistols, machetes, and spears. The plantation workers are fleeing just at harvest time, and the Vials themselves are warned by a helicopter flying overhead that it's time to get out. The rebel army's missing leader, known as "the boxer" (Isaach de Bankolé of Jarmusch's 'Limits of Control' and of Denis' original Africa film 'Chocolat') has reappeared, wounded, hiding out in the plantation, which makes it a double target.

The family itself seems to have fallen apart some time ago, though as usual in Denis' films, the relationships and family histories aren't meant to be immediately clear. Maria's ex-father-in-law, Henri (Michel Subor of 'The Intruder') is mysteriously sick; he seems to know more than the others, but he is powerless; he reigns over nothing -- except that he is the real owner of the plantation. Maria's ex-husband André Vial (Christophe Lambert) has a son by a new young black wife, Lucie (Adele Ado). Maria and André have an older son, Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), who has turned into a sluggard, and seems deranged. Later after being attacked and humiliated by two black boys (they rob him naked and cut off a lock of his blond hair), he shaves off the rest of his hair, takes a rifle and his mother's motorcycle, and becomes a wild rebel himself.

Meanwhile André has made a deal with the wily black mayor (William Nadylam), presumably to get money to escape, and the mayor now owns the plantation, and feels whatever happens he'll be okay because he has his own private army. All the while there are messages over the radio broadcast by a disc jockey playing reggae and saying the rebels are coming. But soldiers in gray uniforms are coming to kill almost everyone, including some of the child soldiers, and some members of the Vial family after Manuel goes over to the rebels.

None of this matters as much as the fact that Maria, a kind of foolish Mother Courage or life force, fights on till the end, even when the new workers she recruits flee, a sheep's head turns up in the coffee beans signifying doom, the power is cut, the gasoline runs out, and family members disappear or are killed. Maria repeatedly says she can't go back to France; to a young black woman she admits it's probably because she can't give up her power. She also says in France she couldn't "show courage." In short, she's useless anywhere else. She has contempt for the fleeing French soldiers, calling them "dirty whites" that never belonged here. This is her element. Unfortunately, her element is disintegrating. "White material," in English, is a phrase used variously by the African locals to denote possessions of the whites and the whites themselves. A child rebel comments that "white material" isn't going to be around much any more.

Denis is good at creating a sense of the many-layered chaos. Her mise-en-scène is vivid and atmospheric. Yet something isn't quite right. The casting feels wrong. Butor is a relic from a better movie, Lambert is unnecessary. Duvauchelle, who has played rebels but determined, disciplined ones, seems out of place with all his tattoos as a youth born in Africa and a good-for-nothing. Nobody can play an indomitable woman better than Isabelle Huppert, but for that very reason it would have been a welcome surprise to see a completely new face in this role.

As 'Variety' reviewer Jay Weissberg notes, the images by the new d.p. Yves Cape are less rich than those of Denis regular Agnes Godard, but may suit the violent action situation better, and the delicately used music is wonderfully atmospheric. This is definitely a Claire Denis film. What's unique is its sense of foreboding. You feel Maria is somehow bulletproof and yet you also fear that at any moment she'll walk into something she can't get out of.

Still, after the wonderful warmth of '35 Shots of Rum' and the haunting complexity of 'The Intruder,' there doesn't seem as much to ponder or to care about here, and even if this is a fresh treatment of familiar material, it's a bit of a disappointment. From another director it might seem impressive and exceptionally original, but from Denis, is seems to lack something, some more intense scenes, some grand finale.

Shown as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2009.

One of the important works of director Claire Denis. The film is important for two major themes it explores: one, the relationships of the colonial expats and the African natives and the resulting social and economic inequality; and two, the internal politics, corruption, and lack of respect for human life when one has gun power.

The film is one of the better performances of the lead actress Isabelle Huppert, who apparently approached the director for an opportunity to work with her. Denis works with regular actors and crew. Among the cast, Michel Subor (the owner of the coffee plantation) and Isaach de Bankole (the injured 'Boxer', a name referenced on the matchboxes he uses in Jarmusch's film 'The Limits of Control') come to mind. The crew includes music composer Stuart Staples and his band Tindersticks (and Ms Denis has a great ear for music that elevates her works). What constitutes the White Material? The white colonial expatriates born and living in Africa is one way to look at it. Another would be their possessions--cigarette lighters, clothes, masks (opening sequences), immovable property, mixed-race progeny they create, indoor table decorations that young native, blonde hair, blue eyes (all of which are stated in the script).

A story of a distressed woman willing to die and sacrifice her own family rather than giving up some acres of land somewhere in the middle of nowhere merely to prove (to none) that she is not afraid.

Isabelle Huppert provides as always an excellent and charming neurotic character. Her character is brave and determined but the whole objective of her determination makes no sense at all.

Overall, the script is pretty poor. It is not certain if the movie wants to talk about female neurosis, ignorant expatriates behavior, social revolution, oppressed against colonizers, black and white or simply tell the story of how someone can get blind by her own ego.

Nice photography of landscapes, some minutes of enjoying to see Huppert acting and absolutely nothing more.