Movie Review: “White Material” is an Epic Poem on Film

By Caroline Chinlund
“White Material”, Claire Denis’ film about post-colonial Africa, premiered at the New York Film Festival Friday night.

This was my first brush with Denis’s work, so I can’t compare it to other films she has done. I was completely absorbed in this one. It’s a feminine epic poem about belonging to place. It chronicles one white woman’s passage from denial to madness as she endeavors to carry on ‘business as usual’ in the teeth of a chaotic civil conflict among black Africans.

The performance by Isabelle Huppert is a dance with the camera. She is slim, erect, somehow timeless in her crisp cotton dresses with their billowing skirts. She is all forward motion and she goes from ecstasy on a motorcycle driving the long approach road to her coffee plantation (hers to manage, but not hers) to hitching rides on one overloaded vehicle after another as people flee the violence and chaos, to chauffeuring workers she desperately gathers to harvest the ripened crop. Keep on going internalized and operationalized, is Huppert as Marie.

The musical score and cinematography sustain the quality of a visual poem throughout the film. The poetic dimension somewhat lessens the impact of the violence. There is much blood. The anthropologist in us wonders and suspects that the psychology of white plantation owners in post-colonial African nations must have themes common across language and national borders. The waste of life and descent into violence involved in a purgative racial reversal of the ownership of “material” are the background of Denis’ film.

I thoroughly enjoyed it for its historic and modern-day psychological insight; my husband found the white plantation owners too close in their sense of entitlement to the present-day U.S.A., and the violence overwhelming. (film still from White Material, directed by Claire Denis)