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White Material follows Isabelle Huppert’s desperate struggle to hold her African plantation together amidst civil war. Mike McCahill is swept away by Claire Denis’ acclaimed drama.

One of 2010’s most acclaimed dramas, White Material unfolds around a coffee plantation in an unnamed African state, overseen by Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert).

With civil war breaking out and her ex-husband threatening to sell up, Maria strives to keep the business running, ignoring the peacekeepers’ advice to leave before the rebels arrive. There’s already been one prominent arrival: The Boxer (Isaach de Bankolé), a local hero stalling for time to recover from a bullet to the gut.

Claire Denis’ filmmaking, sensory and experiential, concerns itself less with narrative propulsion than with what it is to be in particular places at particular times. Her sensibility is wholly cinematic: one late sequence – as the workers settle in on the ranch as night falls, aware they may face the possibility of violent death before dawn – could, subtitles aside, be lifted wholesale from any Western.

Neither slandering nor exoticising the continent, Denis views Africa less as heart of darkness than a home like any other. The question this searching and engrossing film poses is: whose home?

 

Mike McCahill on 13th October 2010
View all 164 of Mike McCahill's reviews