White Material (2010)
Directed by Claire Denis
In the midst of a volatile regime change in a Francophone African state, Maria Vial is fighting to sustain her family’s coffee plantation. With rebels and the army struggling for control, French peacekeeping forces move out, warning the remaining white residents that they’re on their own. But Maria refuses to be driven off the land, even as tragedy looms.
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What critics compared White Material to
Curiously, the ultimate tone of the piece, at least on an intellectual plane, is closer to Richard Fleischer’s much-derided slavery epic Mandingo (1975) than it is to 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.
Claire Denis is a remarkable director ( Beau Travail , The Intruder , White Material ), but in this case she has made an absorbing but pretentious puzzle out of a rather empty (yet nasty) set-up.
Some of our imported art-house films, like Claire Denis's White Material , also suffer from the same disconnect of visual ideas and narrative sense.
Claire Denis is a remarkable director ( Beau Travail , The Intruder , White Material ), but in this case she has made an absorbing but pretentious puzzle out of a rather empty (yet nasty) set-up.
Cowriter (with Jean-Pol Fargeau)/director Claire Denis ("Beau Travail," "35 Shots of Rum") takes a fragmented approach to an investigation which leads to incest and a horrific sex ring, but although her production is handsomely shot by long time cinematographer Agnès Godard and artfully scored by Tinderbox's Stuart Staples ("White Material") her story shards are so refracted there is no emotional stake to grasp onto.