First of two cinema trips today and yet another French film (how many is that this year????). This one by writer/director Claire Denis is set in an unnamed French speaking African country with an escalating civil war. White French woman Maria (Isabelle Huppert) runs a coffee plantation with her ex husband (Christophe Lambert) and teenage son (Nicholas Duvauchelle).
Ignoring constant warnings to cut her losses and leave as the fighting moves ever closer, Maria is determined to stay and bring in the harvest. Her workers are fleeing, fuel is running out and her son won't get out of bed but still she soldiers on in a seemingly blind stubbornness.
She labours in the dirt and dust with a steely determinism working like a Trojan until she falls asleep on a bench on the porch. But her love of the country of her birth is evident throughout from the motorcycle ride across the plantation with head thrown back enjoying the sun to feeling the breeze in her lose hair.
And here is one of the few clues to her pig-headedness which grows increasingly uncomfortable to watch as the atrocities and danger of conflict creep ever closer. The country Maria loves is rejecting her but it is here she feels like somebody.
She puts on a bit of lipstick and swaps boots for delicate sandals for her trips into town. She knows everyone by name and they know her. She is mistress of the plantation and it's workers:
"I could never get used to living anywhere else"
Shot simply and with sparse dialogue the film captures both the beauty and dirt of the landscape and the horrors tainting it. Denis presents the conflict as death by stealth concentrating predominantly on the fracturing of law and order as society is gradually turned on its head. There are no big gun battles just brutal almost silent death and an ever growing tension of unknown threat.
Maria's denial of that threat ultimately ends in tragedy and with her resolve finally being broken she reacts but not in the way you expect.
It is certainly a shocking ending but not the more satisfactory for it and that is the films slight flaw.
The professional views:
Time Out London gave it four stars: "...a mesmerising portrait of civil war, racial tension and one woman’s resistance to change in an unnamed, French-speaking African country"
Sukhdev Sandhu in The Telegraph also gave if four stars: "White
Material, co-written with Marie N’Diaye, is characteristically alluring and
elliptical" There is a video interview with Claire Denis embedded in the review
Rotten Tomatoes rated it 90% from 21 reviews
You can see the trailer by clicking here (am not embedding because it's one of those annoying one that starts as soon as you open the page)
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