Claire Denis in Manhattan 2. _White Material_
sept...@millenicom.com
Festival I hated it. It was so unlike the Claire Denis films
I knew. At the second screening the shock had worn off,
and the film stood on its own. It is cerebral, analytical,
script-driven, feels almost German, a Volker Schlondorff set
in the 70s. I like Schlondorff, but his films are prose, they
do not sing. Other than _Coup de Grace_ and the maligned
_Homo Faber_ I seldom revisit them.
The film reflects Isabelle Huppert's personality more than
Denis'. The director mentioned at the NYFF conversation-
with-director event that Huppert asked her to adapt a Doris
Lessing novel. She instead went with a new script by first-time
writer Marie N'Diaye. When I heard of the project I thought
the two risk-taking artists would be perfect together. But
here the great Huppert, who recently showed such restrained
in Patrick Chereau's _Gabrielle_, appears out of sync with the
the rest of the film as well as with Denis' sensibility. The
director described Huppert as part of the "family.". But she
also revealed that she started working with cinematographer
Agnes Godard precisely because neither of them have "strong
personalities." Personally, I think Denis' unwillingness to reel
in Huppert led to a missed opportunity.
This begs the question: what does "A film by Claire Denis"
really mean? Denis is the rare late-blooming genius whose
every new film since she turned 50 has become exponentially
more fearless. Her style has ranged from the exclusive
hand-held work in _No Fear, No Die_ (her first masterpiece
and her only work not on DVD) to the predominantly static
shots in _35 Shot of Rum_; the setting has switched back
and forth between cramped Parisian quarters and endless open
spaces in Africa. Nevertheless, there are decidedly common
elements. A sense of calm, or at least a brooding quietitude,
permeates her work. From _Chocolat_ (Mireille Perrier) to
_35 Shots of Rum_ (Alex Descas), the protagonist has been stoic,
described by third parties as someone who "does not talk much."
Even the edgy comedian Valerie Lemercier delivered a quiet,
sincere performance in _Friday Night_, so much so that Kent
Jones thought it was her screen debut. In contrast, Huppert
plays her usual self, tart-tongued and full of nervous energy.
Only in a couple night scenes, where she pensively contemplates
her son's disappearance or smokes pot with the Mayor, does she
appear to live and breathe a Denis-like rhythm; these moments
give glimpse sof the film _White Material_ could have been.
Denis's screenplays tend to be impressionistic; it comes into
being from moment to moment, even if the films use framing
devices (both the prior African films) or contain subjective fantasy
elements (_Friday Night_). _White Material_ is instead precise
and analytical to a fault. It begins in the middle of the
story and unfolds in a series of flashbacks; the dual timelines
converge at the film's end. It is very professionally done,
it just doesn't feel like _Nenette and Boni_ or _Beau Travail_.
Agnes Godard's camera usually focuses (as Amy Taubin might say)
on the characters' skins, not the clothes they wear. In _White
Material_, I am repeatedly distracted by the summer dresses and
lipsticks on Huppert, because they are crucial to the story and
indicate which timeline we are watching. Denis' other films
have odd, endearing personal touches; even the vampiric bites
in _Trouble Every Day_ have their origins in stories embedded
in her childhood. Someday we should stick EKG's in her skull
while she is directing to analyze how she makes these strange
connections, or perhaps like Einstein she should donate her
brain to science. In contrast, Denis repeatedly denied that
the _White Material_ screenplay came from her own experience,
attributing it instead to newspaper reports and the image of a
small white woman pelted with survival kits from a helicopter.
There is simply a glaring lack of Denis' stock company in this
film: only Michel Subor and Isaach de Bankole appear in small
roles. Her films have always been about alienation, be it
race, class, or our own body (_Trouble Every Day_); _White
Material_ may be a first where she herself seems a stranger
in her own film, alienated even from her MIA cinematographer
Agnes Godard.
All of Denis' African films are narrated in the past tense;
even the contemporary _Beau Travail_ is filtered through Dennis
Lavant's faraway voiceover. _White Material_ is set decades
ago, at the end of the colonial era when white farmers'
tenaciously hold on their land was slipping and government
troops and rebel gangs had begun their endless civil wars.
Despite her disavowal of symbolism, the screenplay imbues the
characters with heavy historical burden. (The co-writer was
not present at the NYFF.) Both the patriarch (Michel Subor)
and the rebel leader (Isaach de Bankole) are a dying breed,
slowed by old age/injury. Subor's ineffectual son (Christopher
Lambert) son has gone to seed, marrying the housekeeper;
another newcomer to Denis' world, Lambert is only memorable
in the scene he is lying face down in blood, a bullet in his
back. His divorced ex-wife Maria (Huppert) has stayed on to run
the farm, but her restive native farm-hands, mindful of the
war she heedlessly ignores, are on the verge of mutiny. William
Nadylam plays the crafty mayor who has an interesting rapport
(perhaps even an affair) with Maria; he will inherit the earth
at the film's end. Among the youngest generation, Maria's
son Manuel is wild and unformed; once he is even artfully
metamorphisized into a yellow dog. After being assaulted by
the rebels, he goes off the deep end, shaves his head White
Supremacist style, abuses his black step mother, and turns
into the pied-piper who leads the rebel pre-teen soldiers astray.
(It can hardly be denied that the screenplay gives him too much
allegorical weight.) The scenes where these boy soldiers, high
on drugs and sugar-rush, ransack Maria's stores, have a Brothers
Grimm feel to them. These boy soldiers are largely portrayed as
innocents ultimately slaughtered by government troops, not
as ruthless thugs who murder, mutilate, and rape their way across
Africa today. At the Q&A after the first NYFF screening, a
member of the audience complained about the uniformly
"despicable" characters. After the Denis loyalists like myself
shouted him down (both viewings were sold-outs), the director
pointed to the dignity of the characters depsite their glaring flaws.
True enough, even though Huppert's Maria is maddenly blind to
the dangerto her family, to the point of sheltering rebel leader
de Bankole, and goes psycho in the end, she does so with her
flags flying, never succumbing to the self-pity and self-mutilation
her _Piano Teacher_ character goes through
The actor William Nadylam suggested at ta post-screening
Q&A that Maria could have been the grown-up "France"
played by Mireille Perrier's in _Chocolat_. I doubt it -- Huppert's
Maria is an aberation, hopefully the one and only in Denis'
ourve. But I thought Isaach de Bankole's melancholic rebel
leader *could* have grown out of his priest-educated house
servant in Denis' first film. I just rewatched _Chocolat_
for the first time in at least 15 years. In many ways it
anticipated Malick's _The New World_ with its cinematic
clash of cuture. Thus the young France is the Pocohantas
to de Bankole's John Smith; it is she who embarks on
journeys of discovery, moving into and out of the edge of
the frames, learning names of objects in new languages through
the sense of touch. While this the eerie sense of calm
is lost among the dusty roads and nervous truck rides in
_White Material_, the two films shot in Cameroon 20 years
apart do share common themes. For example, a white
wanderer in _Chocolat_ memorably says that, throughout his
travels, "amidst the bronzed african faces the white skin
color evokes something akin to death. The mayor in _White
Material_ would express almost identical sentiments. _Chocolat_
is the smaller but the more focused film. Young France's
father tells her about the horizon, where the earth meets
the sky, always to flee from them as they run towards it.
The 20 years separating Denis' two Cameroon films has
proven the potency of that metaphor.
The last installment, about _L'Intrus_, will only be tangentially
related to my Manhattan trip.