White Material
Combining fierce beauty with prickly personal emotion, writer-director Claire Denis draws on her own childhood in French colonial Africa to craft this masterful, politically charged thriller. Isabelle Huppert burns up the screen as Maria Vial, a coffee plantation boss in an unnamed African country who stubbornly ignores the bloody civil war erupting around her as she fights to bring in the latest harvest. Featuring strong supporting performances from Christophe Lambert as Maria’s shifty ex-husband and Isaach De Bankolé as a charismatic rebel fighter, WHITE MATERIAL examines the lingering wounds of colonialism through a refreshingly complex lens, devoid of cartoon villains or glib solutions.
Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Lambert, Isaach De Bankolé
- Notes From Kim GordonFrom the very beginning there is this incredible tension that sustains throughout the film. It comes from what’s hidden and then revealed so casually. Like the quiet of a bedroom and the sudden appearance of two children armed with spears, stealing the “white material” (jewelry, etc.) from colonizers who own a coffee bean plantation. The landscape is captured so beautifully as these different factions—child armies, rebels and the French army—sift through it. It’s difficult to tell who is more brutal, the rebels or the army. It doesn’t seem to matter who is righteous: It’s all in motion and imploding, changing. The character played by Isabelle Huppert, one of the plantation owners, doesn’t want to leave and give up the land she’s grown to love. She would rather die doing what she’s always done.