White Material

Set in an unnamed African country in the midst of national upheaval, White Material’s breathless pace and weighty subject matter couldn’t be more different from the gentle emotional fluctuations seen in her previous film, the sublime father-daughter drama 35 Shots of Rum. Yet like its predecessor, White Material showcases Denis’ remarkable sense of cinematic observation and respect for the dark mysteries of the human heart. Focusing on the travails of a white woman who refuses to leave an African nation quickly becoming engulfed in bloody civil war, Denis has made that rare film about modern-day Africa that neither panders with easy platitudes nor indulges in morally-dubious stereotypes. And while her film largely follows the aforementioned white woman—coffee plantation operator Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert)—Denis does not demonize or sentimentalize her struggle. Indeed, what exactly Maria wants and how complicit she is in the chaos surrounding her remains White Material’s greatest mystery.

One might think that taking the specifics away from the film’s central conflict made lead to pat generalizations, but the anonymity of the country and its various political factions make them at once more mysterious and more relatable. There are no “real-life” facts to buffer our encounter with the film’s stark vision of a nation teetering on the brink of collapse. Anyway, White Material is less interested in parsing out geopolitical issues than in evoking the queasily vivid sensation of a waking nightmare.

Like many of Denis’ previous works, White Material comes to us through the selective haze of memory, offering snatches of plot but leaving many details just out of reach. The film opens on the Vial’s coffee plantation in flames, with a young man stumbling through the wreckage and the country’s soldiers locating the corpse of mysterious rebel leader The Boxer (Isaach De Bankolé). We then flash back to a day earlier, with Maria running furtively through the tall grass and eventually flagging down a crowded bus to take her back to her plantation. What brought her here? As she rides, the film enters into another set of flashbacks that guide us through the days leading up to the plantation’s destruction, in which Maria vainly attempts to keep the business going as the population flees in the face of oncoming violence. She convinces a group of local men to help her with the current crop of coffee beans, even as those around her insist that she must abandon the plantation and flee the country. She refuses, continuing her mission with unwavering fervor, even as her ex-husband and plantation owner André (Christopher Lambert) secretly plans to sell the business without her consent and the injured Boxer appears suddenly in her servant’s quarters. And then there’s the Vial’s twentysomething son Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), who lies listlessly in bed until a humiliating attack by a pair of young Africans unleashes a wave of pent-up revolutionary fury within him.

The film’s flashback structure isn’t designed to comment upon the vagaries of human recollection so much as position White Material in a state of temporal and emotional indeterminacy. (The eerily plaintive score by Tindersticks goes a long way in setting the mood.) The film occurs in a perennial present tense, where past and future flow towards the viewer in a disorienting rush rather than unspool in an orderly fashion. Indeed, White Material often seems caught in a state of constant movement, with DP Yves Cape’s remarkably supple handheld camera tracking Maria through her increasingly fruitless endeavors or following various contingents of soldiers and rebels as they wind their way through the countryside. At times, this makes White Material an uncommonly gripping experience; but it’s also a meditative one, in no small part because the disconnection from larger plot mechanics allow us to consider the film’s world in freefall. Denis’ movies have been widely praised for their attention to the corporeal elements of their universe—no more so than the landscape of the human body—and White Material brims with small moments of vivid physicality and emotional ambivalence. As a pair of young African children run off to attack a white man, the camera cuts to a close-up of their hands clasped together, tracking their entwined fingers as they rush off to commit a heinous act. Or note how Vial rides her bicycle through a wooded path, her hands isolated in the frame as they flex and wave against a blurred background of sun-dappled trees. More than mere dabs of “humanizing” detail, these moments become the film’s very texture. In a world spinning apart for unknown—and perhaps unknowable—reasons, these shards of kindness and cruelty are all that remain.

This is not to say that White Material ignores the political ramifications of the story it tells. Postcolonial tensions imbue the film, with Maria’s relationship with the land and its native peoples rife with unspoken resentments. By virtue of her skin color and ethnic heritage (French), Maria is an outsider, not to mention a participant in a certain breed of economic exploitation. That she refuses to see these facts points to her unthinking privilege. And yet, Denis (who co-wrote the screenplay with Marie N’Diaye, with the collaboration of Lucie Borleteau) also acknowledges that there is something genuine (if deeply skewed) in Maria’s connection to her plantation and its workers, a complicated love for her adopted country that is not false simply for being problematic. The breathtaking Huppert unearths these subtler emotions beneath Maria’s increasingly monomaniacal drive for survival, but does so without sacrificing the unceasing and perhaps foolhardy focus that powers Maria’s quest.  That a character whose motivations ultimately remain opaque nevertheless feels so lived in owes a tremendous amount to Huppert’s ability to reveal complex emotional undercurrents through the most basic of physical gestures: running, driving, eating, and, finally, wandering in a daze.

Ultimately, White Material envisions its conflicts as the products of deeper strands of oppression that course through the continent’s history. Once unleashed, they sweep through the film like a disease. Perhaps this is why, for all the horrors seen in throughout her film, Denis never comes off as pedantic. Rather than moralize, she bears steady, mournful witness to this eruption of suppressed rage: one that the film views as sorrowful if not surprising. Even Maria is revealed to be enmeshed in forces beyond her control—in this case, a dismissive patriarchy that ignores her singular goals and complicated reasoning. And when this societal virus finally overtakes Maria’s iron will, Denis offers one final glimpse into her heart of darkness that will leave you reeling.

                                            Matt Connolly