It has become quite common of late to see black and Arab characters in the foreground of many French movies. Sometimes they have bit parts but often, as some of the films screened at Toronto’s
Cinéfranco film festival demonstrated, they are the main characters. It’s a late recognition of the country’s multicultural mosaic, prompted, I suspect, by the realities of what’s actually happening on the streets of France, but also because of the increasing presence of actors and directors from those communities working in French cinema. But there was one French filmmaker, Claire Denis, who has always populated her films with members of these groups, beginning with her widely seen and hailed feature film debut, Chocolat (1988).
That movie, loosely based on her childhood growing up in various African countries as the daughter of a French civil servant, touchingly focused on the relationship between a young girl named France (Cécile Ducasse) and the family‘houseboy’ Protée (Isaach de Bankolé, who also pops up as an enigmatic figure, a rebel leader called The Boxer, in White Material) and brought forth a nuanced view of the colonial relationship between France and its African ‘possessions.’ Many of her other films, which were set both in France and other countries, including S’en fout la mort (No Fear, No Die, 1990), J’ai pas sommeil (I Can’t Sleep, 1994), Beau travail (Good Work, 1999) and 35 rhums (35 Shots of Rum, 2008) prominently featured blacks and Arabs, sometimes with their race or religion being a significant factor in the story, and just as often not emphasized at all and merely presented as a depiction of fact. The quietly powerful White Material (2009), her latest and tenth feature, based on a Doris Lessing novel and which Criterion has recently released on DVD in a pristine new digital transfer approved by the filmmaker herself, is one of the former, where race (and race hatred) is part and parcel of the tale. While White Material is also set in Africa, though a few decades later than the 1930s period of Chocolat, it's not in any way a sequel to that movie, it's more a re-visit to the continent. The movie also functions as a bookend to Denis’ oeuvre, not least because it, too, was filmed in Cameroon, the location of her debut.
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| Isaach de Bankolé in White Material |
Chocolat was largely seen through the eyes of a white child, slowly learning about the adult complexities of life, but retaining fond memories of the African men and women she encountered growing up. By contrast, White Material’s central white character, coffee plantation owner Maria Vail (Isabelle Huppert), functions mostly as the locus of black resentment and loathing. In an unnamed French speaking African country (but supposed to be the Ivory Coast, where political turmoil prevented the film from shooting there), presumably in the 1960s, revolution is in the air. Rebels are fighting the government, with ordinary folk caught in the middle. The country’s white population, many of whom, such as Maria, who have resided there for years, are being targeted specifically by both sides, reminiscent of Robert Mugabe's recent attacks on white farmers on Zimbabwe. As an anonymous radio announcer, echoing the horrific calls for genocide in 1994 Rwanda, ominously proclaims that the days of the country’s ‘privileged’ classes, derogatorily referred to as white material, are numbered, the owners of the plantation, Maria, her ex-husband André (Christopher Lambert), his father (Michel Subor) and their son Manual (Nicolas Duvauchelle), try to figure out what’s what amidst the escalating chaos around them. Their frightened employees begin to desert them, though the coffee crop needs to be harvested in five days, and Maria’s attempts to hire on replacements are fraught with tension and complications. Eventually, events come to a deadly head.
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Isabelle Huppert in White Material
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Beginning in the ‘present’ as Maria is suddenly thrust into the heart of the vortex of the violence surrounding her and flashing back a few days, to the beginning of her own troubles, and then back and forth between the two time frames, Denis expertly weaves a compelling web of suspense and disorientation. Maria, superbly played by Huppert, is alternately steely and fragile, much like the environment itself, with the Africans displaying strength and weakness in equal measure. (It’s what we’re not explicitly told about Maria, the reason why her marriage broke up, why she won’t admit the truth about her son's mental instability, that Huppert manages to convey in a gesture or movement or even a look. It’s some of her best acting in a career chock-full of great performances. In fact, Huppert is so at home in Denis’ world that it comes as something of a surprise when one finds out that this is the first time they’ve ever worked together.) But Denis never succumbs to polemics – she’s incapable of that – and doesn’t, for one second, cast Vail and the other whites as villains, though references to their paternalistic attitudes are likely true, as well. She also doesn’t shy away from portraying the thuggishness of many of the soldiers and rebels, who number among them some child soldiers, but also, significantly, allows one rebel to express contempt at how Vail and her compatriots, by willingly paying bribes to get from one destination to another, have corrupted the country. (She’s always shown guts in her varied, non-politically correct depiction of minorities, profiling a loving father and his daughter in a movie like 35 rhums but also depicting a gay black drag queen and (real life) serial killer in J’ai pas sommeil.) And since the rebels don’t seem to be democratically or morally preferable to the rulers, we’re as buffeted and confused by events as Maria and her family are.
Pop icon David Bowie is the subject of the David Bowie is exhibit currently at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Three of our critics, Deirdre Kelly, John Corcelli and Kevin Courrier, attended the show and each of them contribute their thoughts to this review.
