White Material (2009)

In an unknown African country, a civil war is going on. This French woman refuses to escape. She wants to save the coffee.

There's movie horror and there's real horror and this comes close to the later one. But it doesn't escalate, it's latent all the time, until the final eruption.

What's more important is however what's on trial here. It's not colonialism or greed or prejudices. More than so, it's The White Mother, who is rebelled, not only by her son, but by being determined, by not giving up, by not fearing. The key line is when she says to her son: -"I will never let you go". Interesting.

Fmovies: Nobody's asking for constant tales of heroism and villainy. No one wants the same, tired narrative frameworks applied to a piece over and over. Nobody wants a film ticking the boxes that make up a form detailing genre demand every time. Alas, Claire Denis' White Material is so lacking in any sort of punch or concrete reason to give a damn about what's happening that by the end, you end up longing for the pre-sound days of handle-bar moustached sporting men tying young women to railway lines minutes before the hero of the hour rides on in and takes care of business. Here is one of those 'clever' films that depicts a Civil War, as well as all the terror and tension that comes with it, but would like you to think that it's actually secondary to all the "nothingness" going on in the foreground. You know the kind of approach I'm talking about, that sort that should one depict such an understated approach to an event in favour of just nothing, it's somehow "smart". The truth arrives much more crudely than we'd have liked, a film devoid of any sort of intelligence nor reason to even exist; a film without any of the threat that comes with good war films, a film without a grain of interest in its depiction of people too entrenched in their processes to act accordingly – a film without a reason to care; a detached film with very little to get excited about.

Unfolding in an unspecified Black African country fluent in French, the film covers a woman named Maria (Huppert) desperate to unload a coffee bean harvest in spite of the fact the elements, in the form of machine gun wielding child soldiers, are rapidly seeping their way across the country. The central idea isn't difficult to see, this notion revolving around the short sightedness of Capitalists too imbued in their own methods and getting a product out to think about themselves and those around them. The premise, equally resounding on paper, will see Huppert's character traipse around a desolate, Spaghetti Western-inflected terrain rife with war and suffering attempting to find people qualified to reap her harvest. Later on, she must maintain relationships with her former husband and son as well as care for an opposition soldier she's taken into the farm's care. The reality is, again, a piece as dry as the climate depicted within; a film as plodding in its depiction of plants being picked, grounded and plantation life in general being ploughed on with as anything else you could name. At least those Italian neo-realist films which were born out of the Second World War had an urgency to them, had something striking about them in spite similar grounds upon which to revolve around "nothing".

Things start ominously, beginning with the militarian threat in the form of a group of soldiers wading through a series of homes housed now only by the dead within the dark of the night. Things move to the past tense and we witness Maria hide from a truck full of these soldiers as it trundles down the dirt road, wary of the threat but more wary of the threat posed at her coffee beans back home: a fine crop which will be all but ruined because she cannot find the hands to do the required job out of this insurgency. Back at the plantation, frenzied requests from that of Maria's relatives fall on deaf ears. She, in spite of being white, sees herself as indigenous to this Black African nation and doesn't see as to why she should leave.

Her son, Manuel (Duvauchelle), makes for the one character

Just an awful and unengaging French movie about murderous civil war in a backward African country, about a coffee plantation owner's wife trying to get her coffee crop harvested in the middle of a violent civil war(what!!!) that has severely disrupted everything and put everyone's life in danger, and especially her family. What resulted is a confused mess of a critic's darling film that regular viewers will hate or not see, which is more likely, as always. This film will do no business in America, and surely will do poorly even in France. It is that bad and worse than many amateur's cheap docu-dramas.

Chopped up and haphazard editing("this is art")led to poor story continuity, flashbacks and flash forwards were thrown in without any sense of story progression or sense, and phone-it-in, very bland "acting" by the lead, played by Isabelle Huppert, made this the worst, should-have-been-good movie I have paid to see in ages, and I dearly love French films. The only thing good about it was the cinematography, and that was even much less than it should have been for a film made in wondrously beautiful Africa.

Isabelle Huppert showed an emotional range here of A to B and no more. No matter what was happening, bad to worse to worst, her face showed no emotion and was as relaxed as if she were strolling along the Seine, and her calm voice also reflected no emotion no matter that her world was crumbling around her. Plus, the oblique and foggy acting technique of the entire cast, obviously done at the filmmaker's "creative" insistence, did little to clarify or explain anything before or during the crisis they were in, and as was probably said at the time, "Hey, this is an art film! Anything goes." A good story well told instead would have been far superior and actually meant something.

See this failure of a film if you want to see a clueless French woman constantly wondering around rural Africa with a confused look on her face while making some of the most stupid decisions one could make with her life on the line, and that of her family. And the chopped off, abrupt ending left us smack in the middle of the mess and led nowhere. What a disappointment this film was in every way possible. It could have really said something of interest, instead of boring us to death. We can get that for free.

White Material fmovies. In French colonial Africa, Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) is struggling to finish the coffee bean harvest. The rebels are approaching. French forces are leaving. Local have turned to banditry and her workers have mostly abandoned her. The African mayor bullies André Vial (Christopher Lambert) to get his father to sell the plantation. Maria has their white son Manuel and André has his half-African son Jose. Maria stubbornly refuses to leave the harvest even after Manuel is stripped naked by a couple of boys. Manuel starts to deteriorate mentally. Maria discovers wounded rebel fighter Le Boxeur in her barn.

Isabelle Huppert embodies a fierce interior and stubbornness. The family's varying reaction to their situation can be mind-boggling. There is real tension but also frustration with Maria. These are maddening characters in a maddening world.

Chaos reigns in some nameless, war-torn African nation. A rag-tag guerrilla group searches the jungle wilderness for its charismatic wounded leader The Boxer, while some equally ruthless government soldiers try to hunt him down. As the signs of war multiply, The Boxer hides in some outbuildings at the Vial coffee plantation which has been abandoned by its workers. Fear surrounds the decaying French-owned estate where Maria Vial resides with her ex-husband Andre, their dissolute half-mad son and her hated father-in-law. Maria ignores warnings to leave and obsesses over the unharvested coffee crop, while Andre conspires with the sinister local mayor to hand over the property in exchange for safe passage out of the country.

Director Denis makes no attempt to explore her characters, their relationships or the stories behind their present condition, apparently satisfied with documenting the surface symptoms of communal meltdown. She focuses on Maria, but reveals nothing about her heroine except for the foolish fixation on the neglected coffee beans. All the other characters possess similarly one-dimensional personalities - the Europeans are reduced to stereotypes of colonial decadence, while the Africans are portrayed as bloodthirsty and venal. When the film culminates in capricious madness it's impossible to care about anyone's fate, because it's obvious they are symbols existing in a metaphor. Denis doesn't appear to care either.

White Material is a film about a coffee plantation in an unnamed African country (shot in Cameroon). Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) runs the place for her father Henri (Michel Subor). She has a layabout son called Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle) and a weak-willed husband André (played by Christopher Lambert of Highlander fame).

The French army is withdrawing and the country is fractured into regular army, rebels, and newly-formed mad-dog local militias out for rape and pillage, sprung from the ground once law and order dissolves, like Ray Harryhausen's skeleton warriors of the dragon's teeth (Jason and the Argonauts).

It's time to banish the White Material, that is white folk and the trappings of white living. Maria doesn't want to know though and stays on stubbornly trying to process her coffee crop.

The film is quite pretty and captures the feel of Africa on the ground, of the isolation and the wild beauty, but also the extreme lurking danger. Denis has roots in Africa and so manages a lot of authenticity. The dialogue is occasionally awesome, soliloquies in which Maria curses whites and talks about Africa in relation to Europe particularly stand out.

Unfortunately I think there are weak elements, Lambert isn't good enough and his character isn't even necessary (which goes for Henri too), Maria does something brutal and inexplicable at the end (in true clichéd Huppert style), and the film looks like it took a severe amount of cutting as there are plot threads that are barely picked up. The film has the feel of an overly condensed epic. The biggest problem though maybe the narrative structure, where the end occurs at the beginning, which in all frankness, and with due respect to a director who has entertained me with great films more than once, comes off as amateurish.

As usual the Tindersticks provide a wonderful soundtrack for Denis, so important for an auteur to have a proper musical collaborator, but they basically paper over the cracks.

The film is good enough if you just look at is as mesmerising anarchy, but it's not a multi-faceted Denis masterpiece. Isaach De Bankolé is underused as Le Boxeur, the rebel hero general, he's a symbol of a strong moral Africa, gut-shot and dying alone. This character lingers in the memory.