Queen of the Nihilists
White Material
Directed by Claire Denis
At the IFC Center
Runtime: 102 min.
Claire Denis African fetish goes wild in White Material, an artsy depiction of a white family (Isabelle Huppert, Christophe Lambert and Nicolas Duvauchelle) who try holding on to their coffee plantation, and colonialist pride, in an unnamed African country when the black natives begin a murderous political revolt.
As Madame Vial, Huppert wanders through the turmoil like a wraithpale, freckled, hair flowing through dust and smoke, yet still a bit haughtyQueen of the Nihilists. Shes determined to hold on to her land and business despite the inevitable revolution becausecrazilyits her last stand, having given up the European life for the adventure and danger of the Dark Continent. But Denis finds darkness in her heroines psychological state. Thats what distinguishes White Material as different from imperialist romances like Hollywoods 1955 Untamed, starring Susan Hayward, or Out of Africa with Meryl Streep. Madame Vial is a post-colonial Joseph Conrad character redefined through Denis embrace of Frantz Fanons anti-colonial criticism. She represents European decadence, the flipside of Denis typical fetish, which is her fascination with decline.
White Material is titled after the rebels tag for the European interloperreducing them to a non-human element. (These whites, they scorn us.) Denis employs a chic masochism that turns this vague story of an uprising into a color-coded fantasy (beige and yellow predominate). A distant view of mountain ridges resembles the form of a nude woman reclining, as if waiting to be ravished. Madame Vial embodies an indolent empire (an idea better explicated when Huppert played Patrice Chereaus Gabrielle). In a kinky form of reverse ethnic cleansing, Denis slowly details the Vial familys disintegration: the matriarchs folly, the husbands ineffectual panic and the son Manuels jungle fever. After he is violated by a couple of child-soldiers, he goes native; he shaves his head and raids the family stockpile, hastening his own death and encouraging the rebels self-destruction.
Denis photographs African physiognomy more ardently than any other European director. These faces are not inscrutablein fact, theyre handsome and quite transparent. Theyre the return of the repressed: Beautiful kids carrying spears and machete recall the eroticized boys who pop up throughout Gael Morels Apres Lui and the gun-toting ragamuffins in Hype Williams Belly. Their impulses are clearly vengeful. Even a lecherous adult verbally assaults Madame Vial: Extreme blondness brings bad luck. It cries out to be pillaged. Blue eyes are troublesome.
Post-colonial thinkers like Fanon and Aimé Césaire spoke to the liberation of the Third World, but Denis (collaborating with novelist Marie NDiaye) drifts into cynical, apolitical reverie. Her muse Isaach De Bankolé, who played the gorgeous young native boy in 1989s Chocolat, appears here as a tired, wounded counterinsurgent known as The Boxer. Hes a new kind of fetish object, suggesting a background of European experience, and now De Bankolés nobility resembles a death masks. Denis elliptical narrative avoids politics. This siege tale ignores the details of colonial life to gloss its chaotic collapse. Her equanimity is tiresome. Instead of scrutinizing conflicting political behaviors in occupied territoriesas John Ford classically did in Fort ApacheDenis substitutes the complexity of ethics and duty with Madame Vials and the marauding militias fetishized madness. A sequence involving mass-suicide followed by bloody mutilations lets Denis indulge her horrormovie kick as she did in Trouble Every Day.
No wonder the smart-about-movies crowd who routinely ignore excellent films about the black diaspora experience have heaped praise on White Material. By reducing thirdworld tragedy to a fashion show of nihilism, its Halloween at the art house.