Claire Denis has always been a poet of mood and moment, and here succeeds in linking these skills to the creation of a story with oppressive tension and atmosphere. White Material could be her best film since Beau Travail: a disturbing piece of work whose power and grip increase, almost imperceptibly, as the film progresses to its awful and inevitable conclusion. Isabelle Huppert plays Maria Vial, a coffee farmer in an unnamed African state – Francophone, and presumably a former French colony – which is in meltdown. There is lawlessness on the streets and, as in Rwanda, radio DJs pour out inflammatory broadcasts. The colonial whites are being blamed. Every day is more dangerous for Maria, but she stubbornly refuses to leave, perhaps because she cannot imagine a life back in France, perhaps because decades of facing down quasi-insurrectionary threats from the indigenous workforce have left her unable to distinguish this grave crisis from all the other temporary mutinies.
With a bold disregard for traditional Hollywood-screenplay templates, Denis leaves it until quite late in the movie before introducing the other people in Maria’s life: her ravaged and leonine husband André – an intriguing performance from Christopher Lambert – and her son, Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle). Feckless Manuel is the imperious Maria’s Achilles heel. So effortlessly authoritative and demanding in every other area of her life, Maria cannot control Manuel, who lies around in bed all day; he declines to help with the plantation and Maria cannot bring herself to order him.
Denis intuits Maria’s barricaded, siege mentality. Like her, we feel, rather than clearly learn, that she, her family and her business have become a terrifyingly visible hate-focus. Their possessions are the legitimate spoils of revolutionary war – “white material” – and they themselves are “white material” also. This is especially since a rebel called Boxer (Isaach De Bankolé) is hiding out in their compound, giving the soldiers a pretext for violent action, and Bankolé’s peripheral presence is as mysterious and oblique as everything else in the movie. The danger is like an ambient presence or temperature, a background crackle which gets progressively louder and louder. There are no conventionally tense, heart-pumping moments and, actually, no really explicit violence. Yet by the end the movie overflows with adrenaline and fear.
Finally, it is Manuel who expresses the insupportable anxiety that André and Maria more or less have under control. He shaves his head and goes Awol with his father’s rifle, and this flourish of madness, raging in the burning sun as the plantation begins to collapse like an enfeebled government or royal household, gives the story a dramatic shape like something by Edward Bond, an adapter of Shakespeare as well as the screenwriter for Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout.
White Material does not behave like a “thriller”, nor like the traditional hand-wringing, breast-beating movie about Africa, and yet it as lapel-graspingly urgent as either, a movie that remains in the mind long after it has finished.
