Bird Watching – Claire Denis’s “White Material”

May 2nd, 2011 | POSTED BY Brandi Sperry

Here is what I did immediately upon finishing the film White Material (2009), from French director Claire Denis: I started it over. This was a film that was at once so absorbing and so disorienting that I had to go through it again to feel like I had a hold on it. I had been sucked into an assaulting experience, and it had ended with no closure. I had to go back in, to see what answers I could find.

We are in an unnamed French-speaking African country. Maria, played by acclaimed actress Isabelle Huppert, runs a coffee plantation. There is serious civil unrest in the region, to the point where the French military has come, and is now going. A military helicopter flies over the plantation, sending Maria a message: go now, too. We will not be here to help you in the coming days. The nature of the strife remains disjointed for the entire film. To be sure, it involves anger over remnants of colonialism; corruption and control-seeking from native government officials; different groups of insurgents fighting against authority and amongst themselves. Denis does an interesting thing, keeping the framework of the country’s situation vague in a way that is deliberate and maddening. With a less careful approach, it might seem condescending. But the immediacy, intimacy, and lack of judgment she uses in her treatment of characters at every level provide an aura of unwavering respect for the situation—which could be representative of so many struggles throughout history—even as it remains unexplained.

Denis does not want the viewer to ever be comfortable with their grasp of what’s going on. She makes this clear both through a lack of exposition and by beginning the film with a series of non-linear scenes, so that it takes watching the whole film and a lot of effort to realize what happened when. Even then, tracing cause and effect or feeling confident about the nature or significance of certain relationships will be left slightly out of reach. What we do know is that Maria is a woman in deep denial, whose refusal to acknowledge imminent danger borders on madness. She will not see anything but the task at hand, the coffee harvest. Others try to point out to her how little the harvest will matter if they’re all killed, but she brushes off the notion that that could happen. Everything has been fine in the past, and so it will be fine again, she thinks. They only need a few days, maybe a week. When her workers walk out on her, she drives to town to hire more. When stopped by rebels at a makeshift checkpoint where they demand $100 for passage, she barely blinks as she faces their guns. She points out that she knows them all. “Your father sells seeds,” she says to one. Her lack of fear only serves to make the viewer more uneasy; it is the opposite of reassuring.

There is something else going on with Maria besides not wanting to lose the profit from the harvest, though. We find out that the plantation is not even truly hers; though she works it, on paper it belongs to her ex-husband, André (Christophe Lambert), and former father-in-law (Michel Subor). She is in love with the land, and wants it to accept her. We watch her ride her motorbike down a dirt road, and she closes her eyes and turns her face to the sunny sky. She offers one real hint about why she doesn’t want to go to France, wondering aloud how she could show courage there. But, whatever Maria wants to be true, and however much we might understand not wanting to leave a place you consider home, it becomes more and more insane that she will not face reality. Then her son, Manuel, begins his own descent into madness. His is even more disturbing to watch, as he uses violence and anarchy rather than focus and drive as his methods of expression. The actor Nicolas Duvauchelle (who I’ve never seen in anything else, but who is incredible here) slides quickly and effectively from irritating, morose slacker guy into frightening, cruel thug. It is yet another thing for Maria to exercise her fierce denial over.

As the film moves forward, various threads and connections surface. André goes to visit the mayor (William Nadylam), and it’s clear there is some history there. A rebel leader known as The Boxer (Isaach De Bankolé) shows up at the plantation, wounded. Violence in the town escalates. Scenes from the film’s opening minutes start to reappear in the timeline. But it always feels as if the true story is buried just a bit deeper than what we see. The viewer will instinctively wait for things to “come together,” but that’s not really going to happen. We propel to an ending that haunts, because of the action, because of the imagery, and because of the unanswered questions. We don’t get to walk away knowing what the message was.

This is the first film by Denis that I’ve seen, and it made me eager to explore her other work. It is thought-provoking on thematic and structural levels. The acting and cinematography are superb. This is one of those films I would describe by saying I was engaged and impressed by it, while not being sure that I “liked” it. Of course, we don’t have to like things to recognize their worth; watching this film isn’t meant to be a pleasant, escapist experience. It made me push myself as a viewer in a way that I haven’t in awhile. I know that I haven’t gotten all that I can out of it, and so will visit it again. I would recommend it to anyone who is open to that type of film.

White Material was recently released on DVD and Blu-ray by Criterion; it is also currently available on Netflix streaming.

Christophe Lambert, Claire Denis, Isabelle Huppert, Nicolas Duvauchelle, White Material