The Fence (Le Cri des Gardes)

 

Director Claire Denis

THE FENCE (Le Cri des Gardes)      B                                                                                 France  Senegal  USA  (109 mi)  2025  d: Claire Denis

Claire Denis goes back to her roots for this one, an adaptation written by Denis, Suzanne Lindon (daughter of frequent Denis actor Vincent Lindon), and Andrew Litvack in an English language version of the 1979 allegorical play by French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès, who was inspired by Samuel Beckett, that depicts a tense nocturnal confrontation between white managers and black laborers at a British multinational construction site at an isolated, neocolonial outpost in West Africa, where colonial plantations with soldiers have now been replaced by corporate work contracts in a film deeply rooted in symbolism, decidedly more abstract than most of her other work.  During a trip to Lagos, Nigeria in 1978, Koltès witnessed a black workman die at a construction site, an event that drew little concern from the white foremen, which forced him to confront the casual racism and violence that Europeans directed toward Africans.  Denis met Ivory Coast actor Isaach de Bankolé while she was writing the screenplay for her first film Chocolat (1988), which was shot in Cameroon where Denis grew up as the daughter of a French colonial official and starred Bankolé, discovering he was a close friend of the playwright, starring in three of his plays before Koltès died of complications from AIDS in 1989, which is how she discovered his plays, where one in particular stood out in her mind, Black Battles with Dog, as it connected to her childhood of growing up in Africa.  In Nigeria, specifically a construction site, Koltès discovered English is spoken between whites and blacks, where the excessive politeness and distinct use of the word “sir” belies the racist anger and hidden violence that lies underneath the surface just simmering to explode.  Denis is a French director who spent much of her childhood in West and Central Africa colonial outposts, which deeply influences her films, exploring themes of colonialism, isolation, and the complex relationships between Europeans and the African continent, where this is her fourth film set in Africa, including Chocolat (1988), a semi-autobiographical depiction of her childhood in colonial Cameroon, Beau Travail (1999), visually exploring the rigid, ritualistic lives of the French Foreign Legion, confined to their base in Djibouti on the northeast African coast, and White Material (2009), where Isabelle Huppert plays a stubborn French coffee farmer refusing to flee her colonial land during a civil uprising from an unnamed, war-torn African country.  Continually subverting expectations, what these films have in common is native black African cultures being wiped out by white European influences, fueled by hypocrisy and corruption, often through racist male privilege and toxic masculinity, which runs rampant throughout this film, with a Tindersticks musical cue taken from her earlier film WHITE MATERIAL, Tindersticks "Children's Theme" -- Claire Denis Film Scores ... YouTube (2:04), that plays over the end credits, eloquently described by Denis, “This piece of music broke my heart at that time,” noting that using it “once was not enough,” Watchtowers in the Wilderness: Claire Denis on “The Fence”.    

The film opens poetically with an African mother laying a palm leaf on a pool of blood in the desert sand, while there’s also CGI references of a snarling white dog viciously attacking pieces of human organs.  Two African brothers lay shirtless in the sand side by side, but only one appears to be alive, Alboury (Isaach de Bankolé), evoking a parable about a biting dog before concluding, “White man’s fantasy are the black man’s nightmare.”  Following themes of racism, colonialism, and gender, this is a film that dares to confront uncomfortable truths about Western exploitation and power dynamics, as we are introduced to a non-local white engineer named Cal (Tom Blyth), seen driving a truck while boisterously singing along to a Midnight Oil song from the 80’s, Midnight Oil - Beds Are Burning (Official Video), HD ... YouTube (4:33), a rock anthem on Aboriginal land rights that asks, “How do we sleep while our beds are burning?”  We soon find ourselves in a massive industrial refinery outpost of strung-together shipping containers and looming oil drums surrounded by barbed wire, with armed guard towers watching over, where the African guards speak to one another in the Yoruba language, which is fairly widespread in West Africa, but completely indecipherable to most whites living there.  The stage is set with the introduction of a world-weary construction supervisor Horn (Matt Dillon, a close friend of Isaach de Bankolé), who out of the corner of his eye sees an African man smartly dressed in a suit and tie pacing just on the other side of the fence, Alboury, who speaks Yoruba with the guards, allowing him entrance through the first gate, portrayed with a quiet intensity, announcing he’s there to claim the body of his brother, Nouofia.  The ever-evasive Horn, a picture of colonial arrogance, claims he died in a construction accident, an all-too-common occurrence, but it’s a horrible tragedy, cordially inviting the man to join him for a whisky where they can discuss the matter.  But Alboury does not budge, politely refusing the offer, claiming he wants the body as soon as possible as their mother is in mourning, crying and wailing relentlessly, which he aims to stop by bringing the body.  Horn is willing to accommodate his request, even offering a small sum of money, described as “funds of retribution,” but not until the next day, which Alboury deems unacceptable, as Western style negotiations are worthless with someone who is fluent in the language of oppression.  The entire film surrounds this non-negotiable impasse, with the film’s title operating on multiple levels, with a visible fence that separates the construction facility from the surrounding community, but the larger barriers are invisible, reflected internally by each of the characters, as the film shifts from the filmmaker’s usual impressionistic style to a more direct approach.

Like Jean Genet and other absurdist writers, Koltès felt exiled as a homosexual in a heterosexual world, while also growing painfully aware of his own skin color and the repressive history and the power structure it represents in Africa, where land and resources were plundered by European colonial powers, completely ignoring native interests and cultures, fueled by centuries-old racist beliefs that blacks were ignorant and subhuman.  The dangerous and unpredictable Cal is seen again picking up a woman at the airport, Léonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Horn’s recent wife arriving from London, adding further psychological strain to the volatile environment.  A lone woman in an all-male landscape, much like Isabelle Huppert in White Material (2009), she quickly becomes an object of desire, whose mere presence is provocative enough, but her revealing attire and stiletto heels add another layer of intrigue and sexual tension, as the men see only one thing – sex, with an always condescending Cal drinking the couple’s celebratory marital champagne while continually pestering her and nonchalantly coming on to her, even in the presence of his boss who sent for her, like the mail-order bride in François Truffaut’s MISSISSIPPI MERMAID (1969).  Cal represents the archetypal racist colonizer, whose violent rage is activated by Nouofia’s perceived disrespect by wanting to leave an hour before closing time, and later, when he sees Horn negotiating with Alboury, he worries that the foreman will sell him out for the deadly way he handled it, where even the idea of his boss listening to a black man pisses him off.  Examining the racial root of this barbaric act of violence shows the lengths men will go to in order to make a bad situation even worse, where the opening dream sequence features Cal’s lost dog.  Shot in Senegal by Éric Gautier, the longtime cinematographer for Olivier Assayas and Alain Resnais, while also shooting the two previous Denis films, Both Sides of the Blade (Avec amour et acharnement) (2022) and Stars at Noon (2022), this can be read as a fable about the evils of neocolonialism, yet there’s still plenty of underlying poetry, worlds of ambivalence, and multiple layers of ambiguity.  The slow-moving film is about an encounter built on desire, hatred, and frustration among three men and a woman divided by everything, as there’s simply no place for her there, which becomes apparent almost immediately, as the fortress-like look of the place resembles a prison, keeping natives from intruding, yet also keeping those residing there trapped inside, amplifying the psychological tension.  This is a dialogue-heavy, tense study of space and shifting power dynamics between white occupiers and black laborers, where the fence in the film acts as a border between the privileged white compound and the local African workers, representing deeply ingrained systems of post-colonial exploitation.

Set in a largely abandoned construction site where they pave roads through the bush for economic development, with bulldozers and hastily constructed barracks, the atmosphere, unfolding mostly at night, is dreamlike, deeply psychological, bordering on the supernatural.  At night, the guards, all of them black carrying automatic weapons, in order to keep themselves from falling asleep, would call out to one another with strange melodic sounds, which is what made Denis decide to call it The Cry of the Guards (Le Cris des Gardes), the first adaptation of a play and the first movie she ever shot in sequence, mostly defined by a nocturnal space, which she believes best suits what Koltès had in mind.  Koltès understood that writing in the name of Africans would redouble the colonizer’s violence, so instead he presents Alboury as the colonizer’s nightmare, one who answers the most human call for mourning, but who ends as a powerful and uncompromising avenger against white oppression.  While the workers try to normalize the death, claiming it’s something that happens all the time, Alboury’s refusal to capitulate to the white demands alters our perception, forcing viewers to look beneath the surface, as this begins to feel more and more like a cover up, with echoes of Greek tragedy, as Alboury’s spectral-like presence acts like a Greek Chorus, like a persistent force of moral consciousness, eventually viewed by his white counterparts as an act of aggression, bringing to bear something that doesn’t really exist within the compound, namely any sense of justice.  This takes the film into deeper philosophical levels, becoming a morality play, where the outsider, Léonie, learns as we learn, as it’s not at all what she was led to believe, including the man she presumably loves, discovering she is completely unprepared for this environment, as she watches the disaster play out before her in a haunted space filled with a mix of desire and terror.  There are any number of different directions that might be imagined in our heads as we’re watching this, but the film refuses to abide by convention, feeling more like a poetic allegory, with Horn and Cal managing their own fears and isolation, which immediately brings to mind Valerio Zurlini’s film THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS (1976), which is about the relentless psychological torment from an outpost on the edge of nowhere where an isolated platoon sits awaiting the threat of attack from an unseen enemy.  Haunted by a lurking dread of an impending sense of doom, Horn and Cal are exacerbated by a similar fear of the unknown, psychologically projecting their own fears into the minds of others, which eats at the inner core of these men who literally unravel before our eyes, living in a world abandoned by time. 

A Traveler's Needs (Yeohaengjaui Pilyo)

 

Writer/director Hong Sang-soo

receiving Silver Bear at Berlin

Hong at Berlin with Isabelle Huppert

Korean poet Yun Dong-ju

Hong with Kim Min-hee

A TRAVELER’S NEEDS (Yeohaengjaui Pilyo)      B                                                             South Korea  (90 mi)  2024  d: Hong Sang-soo

Wishing not to have                                                                                                                        so much as a speck of shame                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Toward heaven until the day I die,
I suffered, even when the wind stirred the leaves. 

With my heart singing to the stars,
I shall love all things that are dying. 

And I must walk the road
that has been given to me. 

Tonight, again, the stars are
brushed by the wind.

—Foreword or Seosi, Yun Dong-ju poem inscribed on the rock memoriam, from Sky, Wind, Stars, and Poetry, 1941, [POEM] "Foreword" by Yun Dong-ju (1941) - in the 1930s ...

Another inter-generational movie that examines the nature of relationships, but in an atypical way, as it provides so little information, where things are merely hinted at on a surface level, requiring viewers to make up their own minds about what they see, where the changing locations are unique to this film, giving viewers something more to think about, with Hong always in search of greater meaning, where the banalities of ordinary existence are illuminated like a Haiku poem, where each new film may feel more like chapters of a new book Hong is writing.  A minimalist film without a plot or a story, the filmmaker’s eighth feature in just over four years, coming just before By the Stream (Suyoocheon) (2024), where the mystery is that it exists at all.  Nowhere else will you find a film like this, as subtle as anything you’re going to see, existing only in the imagination of Hong Sang-soo, who examines the very nature of identity, but not in the traditional sense, as everything remains hidden beneath the surface, where you must sense, or infer, what you think you comprehend.  It probes the existential dilemma, asking if this is how we view ourselves, or how others see us, inevitably a combination of the two, yet either way, there’s no definitive right answer.  This marks Hong’s return to making a film with the incomparable French actress Isabelle Huppert, having done so twice earlier with In Another Country (Da-reun na-ra-e-seo) (2012), arguably among Hong’s weaker efforts, and the more engaging Claire's Camera (La caméra de Claire) (2017), which was shot in only two weeks entirely in and around the neighborhood surrounding the Cannes Film Festival while it was taking place, with the actress’s sunny disposition matching the sun-drenched charm of the city.  While this may be the sparer of the three, like those films, this was also shot mostly in English, supposedly a universal language around the globe, with some noticeably struggling to express themselves, which may as well be what this film is about, shot in various locations around Seoul, including neighborhoods in the Gangbuk-gu district, with mountain peaks seen off in the distance.  Huppert’s lighter-than-air performance is about as far from Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (La pianiste) (2001) as you can imagine, as Huppert is equally adept in ultra-serious roles.  Hong’s fourth award at the Berlin Film Festival in just five years, winning a Best Director Silver Bear for The Woman Who Ran (Domangchin yeoja) (2020), a Best Screenplay Silver Bear for Introduction (Inteurodeoksyeon) (2021), a Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize (2nd Place) for The Novelist's Film (So-seol-ga-ui yeong-hwa) (2022), and another Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize for this film.  Amusingly, when awarded the Silver Bear in 2024, Hong wondered on stage what the Berlinale jury saw in the film, acknowledging that he doesn’t fully understand what people see in his films.  Many of Hong’s films deal with the awkwardness of human behavior, failed relationships, and an inability to articulate inner thoughts, even in their own language, as failures of communication exist in abundance, so this simply accentuates a theme that is prominent throughout Hong’s films, where you have to search to find his films, which remain relatively obscure, generating a wide array of opinions, where critics did not embrace him early in his career, even though his first five films remain among his best, but today his filmography is rightly deified by a growing part of the world’s cinephilia.  A traveler’s needs are money, food, drink, and a roof over their head, but there’s also a need to be part of something larger than yourself.  What’s unique to this film is the prevailing sense of innocence generated by the traveler’s wanderings, as she enters and exits people’s lives with regularity, drawing differing reactions, yet has no apparent agenda, which some find suspicious, but this leaves her more open to explore the world around her with unbiased eyes, which some might find more genuinely honest, as she’s not carrying any cultural baggage around with her, making her a true seeker who is open to surprises.    

Isabelle Huppert is Iris, a roaming French teacher in Korea with an unorthodox teaching method, whose motives are never clear, where the film is a series of improbable encounters, each featuring a different person playing a musical instrument, a piano, a guitar, a harmonium, and a recorder.  Iris is not in the habit of using textbooks, or grammar rules, and does much more than translating common words or phrases, but instead invents her own style, making it personal, asking students to examine their own feelings, and think of a thought or a series of thoughts that express something meaningful and write it down in French, repeating it often.  In this way, the purpose of learning a language is to unlock meaning, where a new language becomes a way of understanding life itself, as her goal seems to be that to hear your own personal thoughts in another language flips a switch, making it a warm and wonderful experience, not difficult or troubling in any way, where it’s essentially a way to use language to better understand yourself.  With the teacher posing a single question, the student tries to describe how they feel about it, but not just a single feeling, digging deeper into something meaningful so that it sticks with you, providing a greater appreciation of who these people are, feeling a sense of belonging.  Iris then transcribes those thoughts into French on little index cards and asks that they read and reread these passages regularly, becoming intimately familiar with them, informing them, “You’ll love your true emotion expressed in a foreign language.”  For some strange reason, she is well paid for providing these services, though from what we can see, it feels more experimental that reliable.  There’s a sense of curiosity about why she’s in Korea, and how long it’s been, wondering why she felt a need to leave France and travel abroad, obviously seeking something uniquely different, but we never get a handle on what that is, as she remains aloof and unreadable for the most part, but always friendly and even flirtatious with men, with a strange habit of craving makgeolli, a milky white rice wine drink that offers a kick, yet also provides beneficial medicinal properties.  The tremendous screen presence of Huppert is always a treat, especially honed down to the bare essentials as she is here.  The simple rhythms are in harmony with Hong’s other films of the same period, like old familiar faces, but this feels more enigmatic, and in something of a surprise, there are no alter egos of Hong himself.  At the core of Hong’s artistry is language, and the ability to look under the surface, beyond the barriers of misunderstanding that must be overcome when you’re conversing with strangers in a language that is foreign to you, where your words don’t carry the same weight as when native speakers converse among themselves.  For instance, Iris doesn’t speak Korean, so her interaction with Korean characters takes place mainly through gestures, facial expressions, and stunted English.  This creates a constant sense of alienation, but also a more exposed vulnerability, which becomes a powerful metaphor of the human condition. Huppert is capable of communicating an infinite range of emotions, making the gap between what is said and what is understood palpable, where Hong’s interest lies in this expressive display of interaction and emotion which end up generating greater depth, where the goal is always finding deeper meanings.  There are very few filmmakers as distinctive as Hong Sang-soo, a true independent in a society where that doesn’t exist, so he’s carved out his own career path, using a style that is not easy to pin down and describe, where his greatest strength lies in his simplicity, so subtle that it often eludes critics, compounded by the director’s reticence to publicly discuss the meaning of his work. 

Told in three segments, the film opens in a living room in front of a heavily stocked bookshelf with Iris and the much younger I-song (Kim Seung-yun, the girl from In Water (Mul-an-e-seo) and the documentarian filmmaker from In Our Day (Uriui haru), both from 2023) discussing the lesson plan, but as they decide to walk outside, I-song stops to play a short classical piece on the piano as Iris sits and smokes outside while listening, asking her afterwards what she was thinking about while playing, attempting to reach a much deeper realm, which can be challenging.  The choice of an international female protagonist offers an unprecedented point of view in Hong Sang-soo cinema, offering the film a unique evocative quality.  Iris is a mysterious, free-spirited woman who delves into her students’ hidden feelings, asking insistently, “What do you really feel inside?” which could just as easily have been asked of any character in a Hong film.  For her, it’s all about getting her clients to reveal their thoughts and feelings, which she jots down in French on index cards, and asks the students to repeat the phrases with regularity until they identify with its meaning.  From the philosophical introspection in Akira Kurosawa’s RASHOMON (1950) to Sofia Coppola’s meditative Lost in Translation (2002), filmmakers have regularly examined the nature of identity, in many cases the juxtaposition of Eastern spiritualism with Western individualism, where who knows how much of this is getting lost in translation.  A candid observation of the cultural differences between East and West, the free spirited Iris is an example of Western behavior that contrasts with the mostly reserved body language of her Korean counterparts.  As they walk through a nearby park, I-song shows her a memorial with her late father’s inscription on it, a reminder of his importance in her life, but also a reminder that he’s gone, leaving a giant hole in her heart, as she’s deeply affected every time she walks by.  Dressed in her flower-print dress with a green cardigan and familiar sunhat, Iris blends into the natural world around her, reflected by the manner in which she crosses a small stream, first taking her shoes off and then soaking her feet in the water, apparently getting some needed relief, "A Traveler's Need" (Yeohaengjaui pilyo) | Clip | Berlinale 2024 YouTube (1:05).  Her next visit is with a married couple, Won-ju (Lee Hye-young) and Hae-soon (Kwon Hae-hyo), where Won-ju is a bossy wife who takes a particular fascination with how unusual the teaching style is, especially when learning Iris has no teaching experience whatsoever, but simply came up with this idea out of necessity, as she has no other means of support.  The quick back and forth suggests she’s suspicious, to say the least, but she quickly takes greater pleasure playing a short tune on the guitar, while Iris wanders up to the roof to smoke.  Eventually she reveals her love of drinking makgeolli, so they share a few rounds, with Iris getting quite flirtatious with her husband, almost like a little school girl, where you simply wonder what in the hell is going on.  They also walk outside into the park and discover a Buddhist shrine overlooking a small waterfall, with fish in the lower pond, but it’s the discovery of another rock memorial that stands out, as it’s a tribute to poet Yun Dong-ju who died at a young age in a Japanese prison when the nation was under occupation and is still one of the most beloved poets in Korea.  Serving as a quiet and contemplative moment, a poem etched into the rock features the memorable lines, “To be without a speck of shame until the day I die,” and “I shall love all things that are dying,” while another one of his poems appears on the wall of a library, “My path is always a new path,” learning that the poet lived during a time when the wartime Japanese Empire was erasing Korean culture and forcing assimilation, when Korean language was banned in schools, businesses, and even in homes, and later in media, journalism, and literature, so the subversive act of writing poems in Korean drew the ire of Japanese authorities.

In the final section she appears to return home, apparently sharing the apartment with a roommate, the young poet In-guk (Ha Seong-guk), happily and surprisingly sharing what she earned that day to pay her share of the rent.  He also sits down and plays a short piece on the harmonium, where they are interrupted by the doorbell, only to discover it’s his mother (Cho Yun-hee), who simply takes over his life from the moment she enters.  Feeling uncomfortable about how to introduce Iris, she solves the problem by pretending to be his French teacher before going out for a walk, leaving them some time together.  Like the exaggerated hysteria from In Our Day (Uriui haru) (2023), the hovering, overprotective Asian mother goes over-the-top in melodramatic overreach when learning of her son’s relationship to an older 71-year old woman, who is old enough to be his mother, or even grandmother, claiming she’s not who he imagines her to be, but she doesn’t really get it, reading more into it than is really there, where it may simply be a case that young people today are more open to having older people as friends, or companions, something that would be unthinkable in his mother’s generation.  This mirrors Hong’s longstanding personal relationship with actress Kim Min-hee, who is 22 years younger, a fact that has been much criticized in his country for the age difference.  Iris, considered eccentric by Asian standards, certainly stands out with what might be described as a shameless attitude, as she has a habit of kissing the Koreans she meets, men and women alike, on both cheeks in the French way, which clearly surprises them.  Nonetheless, his mother’s regressive reaction is jolting and impactive, embracing the entrenched values of modesty and responsibility that Eastern families feel, reflective of her over-controlling ways, something her son is most likely trying to escape, so it’s all the more remarkable when he passionately defends Iris as living a sincere life, not blinded by what’s fake, claiming “She lives each day never forgetting that one day she must die.”  Her mother is not convinced, and seems untrusting by nature, but quickly regains her composure by offering him food, regaining the motherly balance in their relationship, concluding with a half-real and half-imagined sequence about how In-guk and Iris first met, with Iris seen playing a recorder (badly, according to In-guk) on a park bench, leaving viewers at an impasse as to what really happened, which is the real beauty of the film, as it’s not definitive, but more suggestive, allowing viewers to decide what they think, with the filmmaker adding his own pensive piano music over the final sequence.  In a series of awkwardly comical and melancholic scenes, the humanist cinema of Hong Sang-soo deftly balances two different artistic impulses, one that veers towards playful modernist formalism that makes us aware not just of the film medium itself, but of the filmmaking process and of the mechanics of narrative, while the other moves towards sheer realism, an approximation of the sprawling, disorderly nature of life itself, in each case expressed with a complete lack of artifice.  Many detractors of Hong’s films like to say he makes the same movie over and over again, but with each new work the filmmaker employs subtle variations in his artistic aesthetic and style that are simply less obvious than other directors, ingeniously subverting the way we think about a cinematic work, which is something most directors do NOT do.  Underlying the complexity of Hong’s work is a profound sense of humor and a fondness for deeply flawed protagonists, characters who muddle through despite their hapless attempts at romantic intimacy.  Hong has been compared to such French New Wave directors as Éric Rohmer or the DIY late works of Jean-Luc Godard, but he stands alone as a true original.