White Material: Imperfect, But Much to Marvel At

“White Material,” the new film from Claire Denis starring Isabelle Huppert, is ambitious and intelligent, but it is also slack at times, inducing yawns one too many times. Ms. Denis’s sense of editing is not superb here. The screenplay also doesn’t dig that deeply into its characters. Fascinating issues are raised but in a sketchy fashion. Ms. Denis stands at some distance from her characters, seeming to look at them from afar rather than in close-up. The actors also at times seem puzzled by their characters, which can be quite annoying.

“White Material” tells the story of a woman of French descent (Huppert) struggling to hold onto her coffee plantation in Africa during a time of social unrest and armed rebellion. At times, the rebellion seems driven by lingering hostility toward European colonials and the African elites that supported them. At other times, it seems propelled by a rage for vandalism with no ideology whatsoever behind it. An army of hungry orphans comes together and roams the countryside almost indiscriminately terrorizing those they encounter.

A rebel leader (played by Isaach de Bankole, who also appeared in Denis’s first film, “Chocolat,” from 1988) gets separated from his troops and wanders through the outback alone, becoming the subject of much mythical storytelling like a latter-day Che Guevara. But he doesn’t have much of a role in the film. It almost seemed that Denis wanted to give Bankole a role and threw his character together haphazardly. He appears here and there throughout the film in a rather pointless fashion.

But the rebellion is not the focus of the film. Most screen time is devoted to the plantation owner (Huppert) and her family, and they are surprisingly strange. You’ve never seen the descendants of European colonials depicted like this. Part of Denis’s objective seems to be a critique of the whole enterprise of colonialism and its lingering after-effects. The disease of colonialism, she suggests, claimed victims all around, not just the locals. The colonial perpetrators themselves were warped by it as well, and their descendants many generations later are still suffering from many of those perversions and distortions.

Huppert’s character power-walks around the countryside as if she’s the queen. When the social situation gets dangerous, she seems blithely oblivious, as if the locals never even enter her consciousness. She is so used to being in a privileged social position that her mind can’t even conceive of anyone hurting her or her family. Her blitheness initially comes across as courageous but gradually appears delusional. When Denis introduces us to the lady’s family, we see more examples of how the descendants of colonialists have lost their bearings.

The film ends with an explosion of violence that is at times horrifying, much of it chaotic and inexplicable. There are so many layers of bitterness and hostility that you cannot keep track of who is angry at whom. When law and order break down, you get a bizarre cauldron of anti-social rage. At times, Denis depicts this trenchantly and effectively. Other times, it seems like sloppy filmmaking. When Huppert violently turns on a member of her own family, the film particularly comes off the rails.

But there is much to appreciate here. “White Material” is flawed, but it probes some fascinating issues that I don't believe any other filmmaker, black or white, has ever explored. It also is gorgeously filmed, with the majestic screen presence of Huppert, one of the best actresses in cinema today. Huppert continues to astound in her selection of projects. Given her fame, she could easily be cashing in and getting the big-money roles. Instead, she only takes roles in films that are challenging and that have something to say artistically. Her primary goal, as far one can tell, is not to use her gifts to get rich but to use them to help us see life from new perspectives. She is a consummate artist, the French Sean Penn, if you will.