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White Material
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Modern-day Africa, year unspecified. The region in
which French-born Maria (Isabelle Huppert) looks after her family’s
longstanding coffee plantation is overrun by a bloody civil war. Workers flee
the area in fear, as a patrolling militia clashes with a rebel army (containing
many children) led by the charismatic ‘The Boxer’ (Isaach de Bankolé).
The first half of the story unfolds in a fragmentary
flashback as Maria tries to hitch a ride home by bus. She is unaware that, in
the present, her son-in-law, Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle),
has become deranged. In the flashback, Maria tries desperately to persuade her
workers and foremen to stay on. A pirate radio DJ speaks against the colonial
oppressors and urges on the rebels. Maria’s ex-husband and Manuel’s father,
André (Christopher Lambert), tries to make a protection deal with the local
major, Chérif (William Nadylam),
who has a private army. André’s father, Henri (Michel Subor),
wanders around the grounds, refusing to leave.
All of Claire Denis’ films aspire to a crystalline
purity. Even when packed with the stuff of social and political unrest – war,
murder, racial tension, unemployment, refugees, families in crisis – her films give the sense of having dropped, in the course of their
elaboration, whatever message they may have intended at the outset.
What remains, in the
end, is a cryptic, complex diagram of bodies and desires,
environments and landscapes, confrontations and evasions, things said and
unsaid. At its best (Beau travail, Friday Night, 35 rhums), Denis’ cinema is compelling in its skeletal
purity, beckoning viewers to enter the work and fill the gaps with their own
imaginations. When less successful (as in Nenette and Boni), the films can seem thin and
strained.
White Material is at once an
extremely physical and an utterly abstract political melodrama. Working for the
first time with novelist Marie N’Diaye rather than
her usual script collaborator Jean-Pol Fargeau, Denis
deliberately makes it impossible for us to gauge the exact year in which the
action unfolds, or even the precise location in Africa. The situation that is
so vividly sketched – rebels versus militia, as workaday citizens flee for
their lives and are often caught in the crossfire – would appear to be an
amalgam of many moments in contemporary history: Rwanda, Angola, Indonesia …
The conflict is, to use a much-abused word, universal:
Denis aims for a level of generalised metaphor, but always through very
precise, concrete details. Denis is careful, too, to not take sides, at least
on the most obvious level of the dramatisation: only in fleeting moments like
the final shot (when a soldier secretes the red beret which is the memoir-token
of The Boxer) do we feel her natural sympathy for the rebels emerge.
Of course, Africa has special and specific
significance for Denis, as her debut feature Chocolat, which took off from
autobiographical experience, announced: its culture, and its
transnational mutations, form a constant presence and reference in her
work. As always, Denis takes an oblique rather than frontal angle on this
nation and its vicissitudes; she truly puts the post into post-colonial, as the
primal scene of colonial encounter and trauma is never quite as intriguing to
her as the often subtle aftershocks of a faded imperial expansion.
Hence, the story here – and certainly the power-play
of white dominating black – is virtually over as soon as it begins, the ‘white
material’ (the title refers to a cigarette lighter) already in tatters: we
first see Maria alone on a road, already divested of whatever colonial aura she
once may have possessed, and from that point the action (such as it is) is a
bleak body-countdown to total devastation. Yet the actual depiction of violence
is restrained, unspectacular, almost Bressonian:
blood is not what bursts from sudden wounds, but that which seeps slowly
through clothes (as it does for The Boxer), or children listlessly bathe in.
Maria might seem to be a distant relative of Bette
Davis in any number of 1930s and ‘40s melodramas, or the heroine of Doris
Lessing’s classic novel The Grass is
Singing (filmed by Michael Raeburn, with Karen Black in the lead role, in
1981), which Huppert initially wanted Denis to adapt. The film focuses on
Maria’s determination and perseverance, but it is very far from romanticising
her: Maria’s stubborn wilfulness and her blindness to the social situation
around her – not to mention its horrible effects on everyone that is close to
her – create a bubble around this character, and we are invited to take up a
critical distance rather than empathise.
Curiously, the ultimate tone of the piece, at least on
an intellectual plane, is closer to Richard Fleischer’s much-derided Mandingo (1975) than most melodramas
centred on plucky women: in a Denis diagram, typically, we watch all the
figures flail around inside the contradictions of their personal and social
positions. An emblematic character, in this respect, is Henri, who, while
representing the imperial patriarch taking up space in a foreign land, is an
oddly passive, even benign presence (frequently seen near-naked) who speaks of
Africa as the only true home he has ever known – and, indeed, all references to
France in the film conjure it as some ghostly, unimaginable, lost point of
origin for these ‘white materials’.
Ultimately, Denis presents a ‘history of violence’
that has more in common with Lord of the
Flies (novel or films), or Philippe Grandrieux’s paroxysmic La vie nouvelle (2002), than a typical Hollywood melodrama past or
present: violence is a contagious, dehmanising force
that sweeps everybody up in its psychotic madness, especially the troubled
young Manuel (Duvauchelle incarnating a character
that would have been played for Denis in the ‘90s by Grégoire Colin). At the symbolic centre of this maelstrom is the fascinating, mostly
silent, largely inactive, brooding figure of The Boxer, who – like Ben Gazzara in one of Denis’ favourite films, Cassavetes’ The
Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1978) – seems to be virtually a dead man from
the first moment we glimpse him, his life draining away. He is in the process
of passing over into the realm of myth, as a similarly wounded Johnny Depp did
in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995).
White Material is a confident but
not completely satisfying effort from Denis. One feels a tension between its
status as a star vehicle – even in the case of a star as artistically savvy as
Huppert, who is superb here – and the usual ensemble-driven proclivities of the
director. Passages where the plot wanders away from Maria (such as in the scene
of Manuel’s brutalisation at the hands of two kids), breaking with her
narrative point-of-view, are among the film’s best; Denis’ relief at being able
to stage her usual explorations off the linear track of the story is palpable.
Yet these divagations do not manage to weave the sort
of polyphony (in both image and sound) that, at its height, brings Denis
(especially in Beau travail) close in
artistry to Terrence Malick; the fuller pattern that
might have emerged from a freer treatment feels shrunken, truncated. An early
scene is indicative of the both the promise and the problems of the project:
Maria on a motor bike joins a long line of such movement-images in Denis’ work,
but the depiction of the character’s exhilaration (hands thrust in the air,
wind in her face) tends to rather weary cliché.
Although White
Material achieves the director’s trademark dreamy, watery fluidity –
coaxing even the worst sticklers for narrative clarity to go with the flow and ignore
the strict demarcations between past and present, reality and fantasy – its
structure is not half as daring as, say, that of L’intrus, where (as Raúl Ruiz would say) the images created the narrative,
rather than vice versa. Denis does manage to employ the casual, even brutal
form of exposition that suits her best: crucial information is conveyed on the
fly, in glimpsed details (the survival kits strewn on the ground after a
helicopter passes) or mysteriously brief, unanchored insertions of voice-over
commentary (as when two unidentified locals discuss the white population).
However, like all Denis films, White Material repays repeat viewings, and grows with them. Not
only do the more obscure or offhand pieces of the plot make more sense a second
or third time around, but also the already-thick mood deepens and expands.
Denis is a master of rhythm – here, an oceanic, slow throb held over a
remarkably sustained feature-length time – and of the fusion of image and
music. The score by Tindersticks (frequent
collaborators with Denis) is reminiscent of Nick Cave’s and Warren Ellis’ music
for John Hillcoat’s savage Australian Western The Proposition (2005): violin, harmonium and plucked strings pursue a hypnotic, cyclical
succession of chords.
The film admirably conveys, both in its overall
structure and its incidental details, the vision of a society in disarray,
flying apart at every seam: in Denis’ Africa, there is no place like home.
MORE Denis: Trouble Every Day © Adrian Martin May 2010 |
