Bitter harvest: White Material on DVD

Dogs cross a dirt road under headlights. A flashlight searches an abandoned house to find a man in military garb, a hole in his belly, lying wide-eyed and dead on a bed. Somewhere smoke roils through darkness and flames lap at a building. A woman climbs aboard a crowded bus, the sole white face among her fellow passengers (and how white it is, sprayed with freckles, looking papery-fragile against the red dirt and harsh sun). A peculiar flashback structure reveals itself, the first 15 minutes of White Material (2009) functioning as a vestibule, along which fragmentary scenes are arranged in a seductively disorienting manner, their cryptic fluidity heightened by Tindersticks’ prowling lighthouse beam of a score. Yet everything key to the narrative has been planted herein and will unfurl and amass volume from here on, honed by actions whose savagery cannot be softened by the narcotic lyricism of their delivery.

New from Criterion, White Material is Claire Denis’ third feature depicting whites in Africa, following her autobiographical debut Chocolat (1988), and her inspired transposition of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd into contemporary Djibouti in Beau Travail (1999). Co-written with novelist Marie NDiaye, the film centers on Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), foreman of a coffee plantation in an unnamed country increasingly consumed by revolutionary (and counterrevolutionary) violence. Maria was to inherit the plantation from her ex-father-in-law (Michel Subor): she feels she belongs there, not so much entitled as embedded. When government emissaries urge her to depart (a helicopter even passes over at one point, commanding evacuation through a megaphone, raining down survival kits), Maria chooses to ignore them, staying focused on the harvest, for which she needs to rally a new group of labourers after their predecessors hastily quit: like the servants in The Exterminating Angel (1962), the staff knows it’s time to split long before the bosses. We see her speak to her black neighbours and employees as equals, blind to the fact that in their eyes the new crisis has reduced Maria to “white material,” just another vestige of the colonial past, less person than troublesome anachronism, a kind of ghost. The era that facilitated her forging a life here is rapidly closing, if not already long-gone with the wind, though Maria’s similarity to Scarlett O’Hara ends with her fierce tenacity. It’s the quality that defines her, and when it finally breaks nearly the film’s very end, it causes a violence to erupt within Maria that’s the stuff of Greek tragedy.

In keeping with its geographical ambiguity (the film was shot in Cameroon, but could be numerous places in French West Africa), White Material’s overt political scenario is largely peripheral to the main action: the child soldiers swarming the countryside, the pro-insurgent DJ narrating the rebels’ advance over the airwaves like Supersoul in Vanishing Point (1971), and, though based on Thomas Sankara, the film’s rebel leader, known only as the Boxer (Isaach de Bankolé), remains a mysterious, iconic figure throughout, though, in a wonderful detail, we glimpse a tattoo on his arm that reads “Jamais K.O.” or “never knocked-out,” which seems bitterly ironic until Denis’ eloquent final image implicitly applies this bit of bravado to the spirit of Boxer’s cause, rather than his mere mortal existence. (An amusing coincidence: the name of Bankolé’s character is echoed in the matchboxes Bankolé’s nameless protagonist collects in The Limits of Control, released the same year.) But White Material’s internal politics play out vividly in the stray destinies of the Vial family. Maria’s ex-husband André (Christophe Lambert, his voice reduced to a Gallic growl since his Highlander days) has married and had a child with a black woman and lives in a house right next to Maria’s. He’s now selling off the plantation behind Maria’s back to pay off his debts. Maria and André’s son Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle) meanwhile has grown into a lazy, aimless young man, born and raised in Africa but an outsider nonetheless, who suddenly finds a dubious sense of purpose by identifying with the child soldiers, disposing of his blonde hair, and attempting to position himself as their prospective leader by gleefully and recklessly bribing them with goods. As with Maria’s final wrathful act, something about Manuel’s transformation feels a little more symbolic than real: our agrarian heroine’s offspring is but a different sort of bad yield. Yet I can’t honestly say that these initially jarring, metaphorically-minded dramatic shifts spoil anything essential in my deep engagement with White Material, partly because the performances of Huppert and Duvauchelle are so superb, and partly because their actions do finally feel of-a-piece in this unforgettable work from one of our greatest directors, who, as always, rigorously follows her own elliptical, idiosyncratic muse.

Born on the bayou, dumped onto home video: Bertrand Tavernier's In the Electric Mist

Dave Robicheaux is a lawman in the town of New Iberia, Louisiana. In the Electric Mist finds him investigating multiple homicides, most committed within weeks of the discovery of the victim’s remains, but one of them, the one no one cares about, goes back over 40 years. If a few freshly mutilated prostitutes prompt a certain apathy among the locals, a decades-old case of “nigger troubles” barely elicits a shrug. But every one of these deaths means something to Dave, and something tells him that the crimes of New Iberia’s past may not be so disparate from its present. The bayou functions here a forensic palimpsest, where clues that pertain to one death can be read amidst the traces of another. Every death in this film is connected to every other, and there is the sense that these surroundings, fecund both in vegetation and irrepressible memories, conspire to aid Dave in his pursuit of justice.

I imagine the role of landscape, place and history in this story was one of the things that most attracted French director Bertrand Tavernier, for whom this is the first American film since 1986’s ’Round Midnight. Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski, who also adapted Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s novel The Pledge for Sean Penn’s underrated 2001 film, wrote this adaptation of In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, the 1993 novel by James Lee Burke, who has a home in New Iberia and, like most good mystery writers, has made the evocation of place a pivotal element in his fiction. Tavernier’s film takes place after Hurricane Katrina, so Burke’s emphasis on the elements is only heightened by the lingering wreckage glimpsed during Dave’s commutes between New Iberia and New Orleans.

Dave is played by Tommy Lee Jones, who brings his inimitable dour authority to this tough-ass recovering alcoholic with well-oiled investigative instincts and few reservations when it comes to incorporating a little tire-slashing, police brutality or planting of evidence into his practice. The supporting roles have been taken up by a cast of equally impressive pedigree, with Mary Steenburgen as Dave’s wife; John Goodman as the wonderfully monikered “Baby Feet,” a swampland gangster branching out into movie producing; Peter Sarsgaard as a movie star on the verge of a meltdown and Kelly MacDonald as his very patient girlfriend; Ned Beatty in his stock role of the embodiment of fat, aged and affluent corruption; real-life bluesman Buddy Guy as a local sage and kick-ass guitar player and real-life filmmaker John Sayles as the bitter director of a Civil War drama; and The Band’s Levon Helm as General John Bell Hood of the Texas Cavalry. If that last character’s title reads as incongruous to the setting of this contemporary thriller, that’s because Dave, after having unwittingly drank some Dr. Pepper spiked with acid, starts to receive council from phantom Civil War vets. The dead, he explains, “can hover on the edge of our vision with the density and luminosity of mist, and their claim on the earth can be legitimate and tenacious as our own.”

Dave doesn’t talk like that in casual conversation. His musings on the spiritual realm are reserved for In the Electric Mist’s rather literary-sounding voice-over, which, while echoing Jones’ far more essential flights of disembodied philosophizing in No Country For Old Men, is one of the film’s weak points. To get an idea of just how superfluous this voice-over is you only need to watch the very first scene, where Dave sits at a bar, stares down into a glass of whiskey, then gets up and walks away. His voice-over tells us that he’s an alcoholic and is often tempted to drink, but never does—all of which is made obvious by the very well-framed and performed scene. But I suspect the voice-over may have been tacked on as someone’s idea of a rescue effort, though in the end nothing rescued this film from obscurity. In the Electric Mist screened in a slightly longer version this past February in Berlin before going directly to video. I’d like to say it’s shocking that this pretty sharp little bayou thriller brimming with such a wealth of name talent went straight to video, but these days, when a lion’s share of many critics’ yearly top ten lists feature movies most people never even get to see, nothing’s all that shocking anymore.

Tavernier is no stranger to the American South, or even to American crime fiction. Solid and recommendable as In the Electric Mist is, it’s a far cry from Coup de torchon, Tavernier’s absolutely brilliant 1981 adaptation of Jim Thompson’s deliciously sordid 1964 novel Pop. 1280, which follows the infernal trajectory of a seemingly bovine but secretly sociopathic small town sheriff. Tavernier’s blackly comic and inspired re-envisioning shifts the action from the West Texas to 1930s French West Africa and shines a dazzlingly fresh light on the story’s colonialist undercurrents. It also features masterful performances from Isabelle Huppert and the late, great Philippe Noiret. Criterion put it out on DVD some years back and it is very much worth seeking out.

The brutality of the bourgeoisie, the allure of apocalypse: 20 years of Michael Haneke

There are reasons to be grateful for the existence of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, even if you don’t exactly fall in love with his movies. He is a master craftsman, as devoted to technical precision as the finest Hollywood journeyman, as formally rigorous as the most innovative arthouse maverick, and, most impressively, has maintained this standard while working in different languages and different countries with distinct industries. He’s prolific—10 features in 20 years, with another on the way—yet a case can be made for his having never made a single film that’s contributed to what he describes as the disempowerment of the audience. Long after the golden age of foreign and art film distribution, Haneke has held unrelentingly to a mandate of consistently challenging movies and survived, even thrived. And that’s fascinating in itself: large numbers of people see Haneke’s films, yet not a one of them promises a good time in any normal sense. They’re downright unpleasant. And there is no release.

The ten features tell a story in themselves, of a singular career, of an aesthetic, of an evolving social critique, of an increasingly amalgamated Europe and globalized world. Thanks to Metro Cinema’s generous full retrospective, Edmonton filmgoers can watch it all unfold completely and chronologically, one chilling, enigmatic, unbroken single-shot scene at a time.

Based on actual events, The Seventh Continent (1989) is a sort of diptych that’s devastatingly effective in its simplicity. A bourgeois family of three is shown performing quotidian tasks—closing doors, preparing breakfast, tying shoes—often in close-ups that show no preference for faces or offer clues that might convey an internal life. This series of what would be inserts in a conventional movie is strangely riveting, brimming with a certain tension. Devoid of scoring and making use of black leader between scenes, there’s genuine beauty to the clipped rhythm of it all, to the collage of room tones, and the superbly specifying actors—including the late Ulrich Mühe, a Haneke regular—embody the tone plausibly. Haneke’s debut follows the course of the family’s routines, checking in to see how they alter over three years, until the machinery of their “lifestyle” suddenly collapses in one of cinema’s most sustained sequences of intensely concentrated, near-wordless action. The result is really a perfect movie on its own terms, with an inspired balance of overt polemic and ambiguity. It also, to a surprising degree, perfectly encapsulates so much of what’s to come.

Benny’s Video (92) advances certain aspects of its predecessor while focusing more pointedly on what is surely Haneke’s central zone of interest: visual media. The horrific Oedipal journey of teenage Benny (Arno Frisch) is one filtered through the abstraction of increasingly accessible video technology, which Haneke proposes as facilitating voyeuristic tendencies to ever-more alarming degrees. A crudely-made video of animal slaughter is slowed-down in replay, making what was initially intended as a quick, relatively painless death into a weirdly aestheticized bloodbath. Benny, almost always placid, seems completely untouched by the Real, in the Lacanian sense. He seems to process the world exclusively through video screens. Video becomes a component in teenage mating rituals, which themselves house experiments in punishment. So there is watching, there is death, and there is the cleaning up afterwards. There’s also a mother-son vacation to Egypt, where the unruliness of the greater word is still kept always at arm’s, or, as it were, eye’s length. It’s also kind of boring, but this very carefully-nourished boredom seems vital to how this all works. Haneke’s gaze can be at once that of a visionary director and that of an especially patient anthropologist. If you can jive with both sensibilities, you’re in for the long haul.

There is, however, the problem of Funny Games (97) to contend with. Haneke’s most notoriously merciless work, an anti-thriller in which a pair of absurdly polite hooligans (one of whom is Frisch, as though picking up where he left off) terrorize another of Haneke’s bourgeois families on holiday, is brutal, but it’s also quickly numbing and over-intellectualized while feeling intellectually facile. Haneke seems to have had a checklist of items he considered antithetical to genre moviemaking—kill the dog, kill the kid, break the fourth wall—and went about dutifully seeing each through. The irony lies in how, at the best of times, the very sort of polished Hollywood thriller Funny Games explicitly opposes can actually prove far more thought provoking than such exercises in didacticism. Yet Haneke was clearly happy with the results. He re-made the thing, shot-for-shot, as his English-language debut with Hollywood stars (07). I wonder if he liked the marketing—Warner pitched it exactly as if it were a generic thriller.


With Code Unknown (00), Haneke arrives at a major turning point and delivers what may be his finest work. His first film made in France inverted the hermetically-sealed strategy of Funny Games, broadening his perspective to take in a larger network of character types, relationships, social confrontations and causalities, and Juliette Binoche, who from her first moment onscreen introduces a warmth and fullness of character previously unseen, if not un-permitted, in Haneke’s work. Brilliantly book-ended with scenes of deaf-mute children playing charades—an elegant expression of the title—the remainder of Code Unknown consists of scenes, nearly all of them playing out in single, unbroken shots, that explore questions of what is and isn’t other people’s business, from an uppity young black man’s attempt at forcing an act of social justice to Binoche’s paralysis when overhearing domestic violence to a photojournalist’s resurrection of Walker Evans’ fabled journey through the New York subway system taking surreptitious photos of strangers. Like the unseen, rather obnoxious director who at one point auditions Binoche’s actress, the photojournalist seems to be hunting for a “real face.” Yet, while I’d argue that Code Unknown explores inter-connectivity with greater resonance than films like Paul Haggis’ Crash (04) or Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (07), Haneke is never so assuring. The characters here, spanning class, race, nationality, education and age, are given freer reign to reveal a richness of attitude, anxieties and even fleeting moments of happiness and relief. But their environment doesn’t make room for complete vulnerability and so many masks are worn that the very notion of witnessing truth becomes futile. This was the first Haneke I saw, and it remains a personal favourite.


Haneke’s embracing of France and its great actresses continued to great acclaim—and even greater controversy—with The Piano Teacher (01), an adaptation of fellow Austrian Elfriede Jelinek’s novel. Isabelle Huppert’s Erika Kohut, an instructor obsessed with a 17-year-old pupil, is a creature of a sort I’m not sure the movies had ever previously given us: intensely sexually repressed, sadomasochistic, obsessive, icy in that way that disguises overwhelming anguish, capable of Elektralian hysteria, and never for a moment less than magnetic. It is a career-capping performance, and with Huppert that says a lot.

When Huppert returns for Haneke’s criminally under-seen dystopian drama Time of the Wolf (03), the only way she can kick things off properly is to get sprayed with her murdered husband’s blood and then vomit in the first five minutes. From there, the apocalypse is a paddleboat ride. Whatever disaster befell society before the story begins is—and here’s a surprise—left undefined. Yet in destroying the social order, the media and consumer-based society, it’s also robbed Haneke of the key subjects of his entire canon. The good news is that Haneke not only rises to the occasion but also proves just what a shrewd and atmospheric storyteller he can be with a minimum of elements. And of course, as Huppert’s Anne and her children traverse the countryside to fend for themselves, the customs of civilized society will haunt them in their every encounter. (It’ll be interesting to see how this film compares to John Hillcoat’s forthcoming The Road.) Whether you know Haneke’s work or not, I urge you to catch this one in a rare public screening.

Haneke’s almost perverse emphasis on the irresolvable finds its apotheosis in Caché (05), another hit, and his most recent, though hopefully not last French film. Pairing Binoche with Daniel Auteuil, Caché returns to the sinister voyeurism of Benny’s Video by way of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (97), when a Parisian bourgeois couple starts receiving anonymous videocassettes that feature only unedited footage of their home’s exterior. Haneke has insisted in interviews that he hasn’t been especially interested in specificity of location in his films and that readings emphasizing the conditions of a certain national culture are usually made out of a failure to recognize how these stories could take place anywhere in the first world. It’s a respectable and quite instructive stance, but I still think it makes Caché that much richer a movie when we account for the particularities of the Algerian War and the Paris massacre of 1961. There is a ghost lurking in this story that demands to be reckoned with. It is a ghost not dissimilar to those haunting other nations, but it looms over these characters with a particular gravity, making it an interesting companion piece to Alain Resnais’ masterpiece Muriel (63).

Which brings up to the present, post-Funny Games US and pre-The White Ribbon, Haneke’s first Austrian film in a dozen years. Despite the divisive retroactive—not to mention reactionary—aspects of his last movie, Metro’s retrospective reminds us that there’s every reason to anticipate more provocative and fascinating work from Haneke. I only hope there continues to be room in the world for the likes of him.

Christopher Walken: genetically predisposed to imbalance?

Christopher Walken has this condition called heterochromia iridis. His screen presence is typically described as unbalanced: does this uneven distribution of pigment in the irises, resulting in his two different coloured eyes, one blue, one hazel, hold the key to his uncanny, singular abilities with convincingly embodying unbalanced characters? 

I think through my mental catalogue of images of Walken on screen, and he's never grounded, never standing evenly and calmly on both feet. He bounces and sways. He's a compulsive dancer. His speech patterns are never what you could describe as evenly measured. He likes to throw in a little surprise emphasis or spike the end of a sentence. He's a master of catching you off guard, and when combined with a sense of vulnerability and tenderness, such as in the scene where he tells Isabelle Huppert about his wallpaper (one of my all time favourites) shortly before his violent death, or when he utters his final words to Brooke Adams after Geza Kovacs plugs him full of lead, the outcome is unusually touching, always odd, and arguably unlike anything else in movies. 

Walken turns 65 today. He looks fit, agile like a man half his age, still plowing indiscriminently through several dubious projects. I understand he's supposed to play Ozzy Osbourne in some movie about Mötley Crüe. He seems like he could go on like this forever. I'm confident that there are still great roles ahead, but either way he's still so enjoyable in the lousy ones.