Filmpressionism

Isabelle Huppert's  plantation is upside down in White Material.

White Material. Written by Claire Denis, Marie N’Diaye & Lucie Borleteau. Directed by Claire Denis.

Though it has no formal name, there is a cinematic equivalent of Impressionism. By this, I mean movies that, like Impressionist paintings, rely on our faculties of perception to pull together what, up close, may look like a haphazard collection of brushstrokes. In films the “brushstrokes” are often small incidents that in themselves don’t mean much or go anywhere, but taken together, evoke a theme. For better or worse, Claire Denis’ White Material is a good example of this “filmpressionism.”

            The scenario by Denis et al. deals with a civil war in an unnamed West African nation. Marie and Andre Vial (Isabelle Hupert and Christopher Lambert) are the white owners of a coffee plantation, trapped by the stuggle between the national army and a militia of machete-toting, pill-popping child soldiers. With scant concern for her own safety, Marie moves heaven and earth to get their beans harvested; Andre, meanwhile, connives with the local “chérif” (William Nadylam) to sell his property and get out of Dodge. Both are puzzled and alarmed by the behavior of her son Manuel (Nicolas Duvachelle), who veers from utter torpor to head-shaving Travis Bickle-sque lunacy quicker than a tropical sunset.

            White Material should not be confused with the more conventional (and far more fun) White Mischief (1987), which was also set in Africa and likewise dealt with the twilight of European privilege there. Instead of kinky imperial escapades, Denis has structured her film as some kind of fever dream, stringing out a succession of languorous moments broken by Marie’s suggestive—but rarely dramatic—memories. The aim seems not so much to tell a story as to gesture at one that we are invited to concoct for ourselves.

            The gestures have some power. There’s a mood in the empty domestic spaces Denis surveys, filled with trophies of a culture the whites will never be part of or understand. There’s pathos in the feckless indomitability on Huppert’s face (still lovely at 48). But there are no real performances here, because there’s no drama to play—just a series of pregnant silences. In tone, the film actually resembles the “plantation dinner” scene that was left out of the original Apocalypse Now (but that does appear in the Redux version), wherein Willard and his crew share a tense, overlong dinner with a family of French aristocrats holding out in their jungle chateau. Much like Coppola’s version of French colonialism, White Material is interesting, evocative, and but by the end, about as lively as a wake. We end up somehow intrigued and bored.

            This is unfortunate, because there’s plenty of promising material in Material. Like Rwanda, atrocities in this fictive African nation are abetted by hateful talk radio; like Zimbabwe, the whites are targeted though, in most cases, their families are every bit as native-born African as the thugs unleashed on them. Good as it was, Hotel Rwanda didn’t exhaust the possibilities for storytelling about modern Africa—as long as the teller remembers actually to tell a story.

Copyright 2011 Nicholas Nicastro