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.

Of Gods and Men: the limits of brotherly love

We know that Xavier Beauvois’ Cannes Grand Prize-winner Of Gods and Men was drawn from the 1996 incident in which seven Tibhirine Trappist monks were kidnapped and eventually beheaded during the Algerian Civil War, the exact circumstances of their slaughter a matter of controversy and contention to this day. So we might expect something draped in dread to unfold here, a drama whose hopeless fluctuations amount to nothing more than a death march. But inevitability is a force one strives to come to terms with when one’s life is devoted to worship and public service. That things are bound to end poorly becomes a matter of secondary importance once Beauvois and his collaborators usher us into this realm of carefully nurtured quietude, where disparate, overwhelming inner struggles are conducted and resolve terribly hard-won, where fraternal bonds are largely strengthened as much through disagreement and prolonged panic as they are through a sense of harmony and shared ideals. This is indeed a meditative movie (how could it be otherwise?), yet also at times a joyous one, one that reminds us of several important things: that running away only brings new things to run from; that need, vocation, and genuine communion transcends the confines of dogma; and that god (or God), whether regarded as a concept or a true presence, is only alive when his followers engage fully with the world in all its disorder.

Written by Beauvois and Etienne Comar, and photographed with a loving (and necessary) bias toward natural light by Caroline Champetier, Of Gods and Men pulls us in by immersing us in the monks’ daily activities, especially those of the abbot Christian (Lambert Wilson), an Islamic scholar who has the magnificent nerve to quote the Koran to Muslim terrorists threatening his life, and Luc (Michael Lonsdale), a trained physician who administers humble remedies (not to mention shoes) to the local, largely impoverished Algerian population. As the threat of uprising prompts government officials to plead with that monks to flee and the townsfolk to plead for their steadfastness, each of the monks are forced to make their cases for staying or going, the disagreements causing considerable tension that seems only to abate when the group joins in song, their roster of Gregorian chants emerging as one of the film’s most fortifying refrains, the other being Beauvois’ dogged use of lingering close-ups to glean some sense of the monks’ individual inner turmoil, which emerges as diverse and resonant. Luc, who is not the eldest among the monks but whose health is poor, seems to be the only one who knows from the start what his choice is. “I’m not scared of death,” he says. “I’m a free man.”

It’s serendipitous that Of Gods and Men should arrive in theatres while Claire Denis’ White Material still lingers in the memories of many moviegoers (at least in the US; here in Canada the film has yet to enjoy a well-deserved release). Both concern the legacy of French colonialism as it effects those attempting to make a life for themselves in those countries afflicted, but the contrast is fascinating. Denis’ mise en scène is narcotic in its way, but also secular, dark, fierce and brutal, where Beauvois’ approach centers on the serene and a universal, non-denominational sense of religious feeling, even when the grotesque looms just outside the monastery gates. It’s a gift to have both these visions circulating through our collective consciousness, helping us to reflect on the complexity of global ruptures, and those ghosts from the past that continue to haunt us.