White Material
Claire Denis (2009)
A reddish-haired, pale-skinned woman in pale-coloured clothes stands in the middle of an empty red dirt road, seeming not to know which way to turn. The colour-coordinated image perfectly expresses the situation of Maria, who is the protagonist of White Material. She runs a coffee plantation in an unspecified country in what was once French colonial Africa. A civil war between ‘patriots’ and ‘rebels’ is making life there increasingly dangerous but Maria refuses to heed the warnings of the authorities that she should get out – perhaps because she knows they don’t like Europeans anyway. (A radio broadcast derides the produce of Maria and her kind as ‘mediocre coffee we wouldn’t drink’.) I’m not sure now whether this image occurs at the start or the end of Claire Denis’s film – possibly both. In retrospect, I feel it was the beginning and that, once you’re able to relate the image to the situation that it symbolises, the picture might as well end. I never got my head round the details of the narrative so I may be doing Denis an injustice. If I didn’t misunderstand White Material, it’s another example of a film overrated purely because its director can create strong and elaborate images and in spite of the fact that the ideas behind the visuals are limited and old hat.
In interview Claire Denis and Isabelle Huppert, who plays Maria, have described their interest in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, adapted for the screen nearly thirty years ago with Karen Black in the role of a farmer’s wife in Rhodesia. (The film was called Killing Heat – for its American release anyway – and was written and directed by Michael Raeburn. The production team was Swedish.) Although its inspiration may be this specific novel, White Material, which Denis wrote with Marie N’Diaye, feels generic. Maria’s stubborn selfishness, which brings about the deaths of both other European whites and African rebels, especially the ‘kid soldiers’ on whom they seem to rely considerably, is akin to the suicidal intransigence of ‘stayers on’ in various examples of colonial literature – there’s no suggestion of any difference in this respect between colonial and post-colonial contexts. Denis and/or Huppert (I forget which) have also talked about the fact that Maria is determined to stay in Africa because her status, were she to return to France, would be much less remarkable. I wasn’t convinced that she would think that (if she’s been away from France all her adult life, as appears to be the case) or that it was necessarily true.
There’s no denying that White Material’s imagery is insistent. The red earth of the landscape is, as it were, increasingly coloured by the blood seeping into it from black-skinned and white-skinned bodies. Isabelle Huppert’s auburn coloration seems to implicate her in the bloodshed; and Nicolas Duvauchelle as Maria’s son matches his mother’s colouring. Huppert has a remarkable translucent quality; I wish I were more confident that the humourless woman she portrays was a creation of the actor and not an illustration of her own approach to the role. Isaach de Bankolé, as the fatally wounded rebel leader (‘The Boxer’), is an image rather than a personality and Christopher Lambert as Maria’s husband André barely registers at all. The most striking character in White Material is the son, Manuel – indolent at first but, after he’s been humiliated by some local boys, transformed. Manuel shaves his hair and goes native, de-Europeanising himself. Manuel is striking partly because Nicolas Duvauchelle, as he showed in The Girl on the Train, is a compelling young actor – and very convincing here as someone younger than his own thirty years. In the key scene in which Manuel has been made to remove all his clothes, however, Claire Denis seems too keen to exploit the situation. It’s one thing to show Duvauchelle completely naked in order to express what has been done to Manuel; another for the camera then to show his genitals again when the shot is disconnected from Manuel’s predicament (as if to say ‘Just in case you missed them the first time …’) Male directors have been keen to do this kind of thing with young actresses for decades but it doesn’t seem to represent progress when an art-house female director follows suit.
I think the first time the phrase ‘matériel blanc’ is used in the movie is in specific reference to a cigarette lighter owned by one of the Europeans. It then expands to refer to whites generally. Given what ‘materiel’ means in English (‘the equipment, apparatus, and supplies of a military force or other organisation’), the phrase ‘matériel blanc’ appears to have a layer of meaning lost in translation (and the film is listed on IMDB only with the English title White Material). Claire Denis skilfully creates the landscape’s parched texture, and the rhythm of the place – a sense of time passing slowly and of the fine margin between lethargy and mayhem. But I didn’t like White Material and I don’t think it adds up to much. The solemnity of the bits of classical music which Denis uses immediately lets you know you’re in for a lecture. Film isn’t essentially a verbal medium anyway but if you put the lecture of this film into words there wouldn’t be a lot to say.
5 July 2010