WHITE MATERIAL B
France Cameroon (106 mi)
2010 ‘Scope d:
Claire Denis
At least partially inspired by the heroine in Doris
Lessing’s 1950 novel The Grass Is Singing,
this is a film with Denis’ imprint all over it, but also one that struggles to emotionally
grab hold of the audience, as much of it has the illusionary appearance of a
nightmarish bad dream, perhaps a hallucination, as Denis accentuates the lush,
dreamy landscape for an interior story of madness in the midst. Set in an unnamed former French colonial
African country that is going through extreme political turmoil with rebel African
forces mounting attacks forcing the whites out of the country, demanding that
what possessions they leave behind, which they contemptuously call “white
material,” rightly belongs to them. Shown
in a fractured flashback style that makes free association use of time, jumping
back and forth between events, and told from the ever more precariously dangerous
point of view of a righteously stubborn and seriously delusional white family
that runs a coffee plantation and refuses to be scared off their land, despite
signs of vicious brutality all around them.
Isabelle Huppert, in her pretty pink dresses, runs the coffee
plantation, where even after all her black workers escape in mass to safety
routinely hires more workers, claiming they only need 5 days to harvest this
year’s crop or all will be lost. Her
husband, Christopher Lambert, sees the writing on the wall and recommends they
heed the French helicopter that urges them to escape while they can, as the French
government is pulling out of the country in advance of a bloody civil war, but
Huppert scoffs at the idea of returning to France, which she sees as regimented
and overly conventional, mediocre even, preferring the open freedom they have
here, even as it is disappearing before her eyes.
Because of the altered time structure, the audience is
intentionally bewildered by the disorienting sequence of events, never knowing
what actually precedes what is shown onscreen, which adds to the confusion that
already exists from the escalating violence.
While the family may be blind to events around them, the audience
witnesses signs of danger everywhere, much like a ghost story, as armed elementary-aged
children enter their house at will, but may as well be invisible to
Huppert. Similarly, advancing rebel
forces are little more than abandoned or orphaned children carrying automatic
weapons and oftentimes fueled by unnamed pharmaceutical drugs which they take
by the handful. More telling is the relationship
Huppert has with her son (Nicolas Duvauchelle), a lazy, sit-on-his-ass, overly
indulged grown kid who refuses to offer any help whatsoever to the growing family
crisis, yet Huppert refuses to allow anyone to criticize his overt
weaknesses. Instead he is humiliated by
well-armed kids who leave him stripped naked on his own property, which sends
him into a rage of senseless psychotic behavior, crossing the line with some of
the domestics, finding himself without a home or a country that wants him, a
metaphor for the whites losing their purpose for being there, especially with
roaming gangs in the vicinity so willing to slit their throats, as they have
nothing, while the whites have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
This is not an easy story to tell as African civil wars
turning into a bloodbath are an all too familiar pattern that western audiences
are familiar with, leaving behind images of hands cut off and mutilated limbs,
not to mention tribal vengeance that is among the most vicious on the planet. But in Denis’s hands, much like the shirtless
imagery of young men in Beau
Travail (1999), she focuses on the shirtless young boys carrying machetes
or the young girls with pistols or machine guns in their hands. These haunting images of children really
drive this film, as despite Huppert’s presence in nearly every scene, she’s
running around in circles like a chicken with its head cut off, while these
lost and abandoned children are supposed to be the nation’s future. Both are equally dysfunctional and have
little use for the other, understanding nothing at all about each other’s
worlds. The languid pace and dreamlike
imagery creeps up on the viewer, where by the end it resembles the French
plantation sequence in APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX (2001), where an apocalypse is
brought upon by governments or people within an existing society that fail to
heed the warning signs, as one can imagine the Vietnamese closing in on them
very much like the children coming over the hills in this film, where the horror
and bloody aftermath resembles the insanity sequence featuring the murder of
Kurtz (Brando), where the only way to combat a growing nightmare is to enter the
nightmare itself. Here much of the
threat of violence is shown with meticulous detail while the actual murders
themselves remain shrouded in allegorical offscreen mystery where the viewer
only sees the aftermath. In this film, set
to the mournful music of the Tendersticks, sounding much like early Pink Floyd
creating a pervasive feeling of everpresent doom, they eerily blend into the
same nightmare, losing all touch with reality at some point, becoming more abstract
and metaphorical, where the funereal reality is lost in a hallucination of
senseless and horrific violence.
