Nobody's asking for constant tales of heroism and villainy. No one wants the same, tired narrative frameworks applied to a piece over and over. Nobody wants a film ticking the boxes that make up a form detailing genre demand every time. Alas, Claire Denis' White Material is so lacking in any sort of punch or concrete reason to give a damn about what's happening that by the end, you end up longing for the pre-sound days of handle-bar moustached sporting men tying young women to railway lines minutes before the hero of the hour rides on in and takes care of business. Here is one of those 'clever' films that depicts a Civil War, as well as all the terror and tension that comes with it, but would like you to think that it's actually secondary to all the "nothingness" going on in the foreground. You know the kind of approach I'm talking about, that sort that should one depict such an understated approach to an event in favour of just nothing, it's somehow "smart". The truth arrives much more crudely than we'd have liked, a film devoid of any sort of intelligence nor reason to even exist; a film without any of the threat that comes with good war films, a film without a grain of interest in its depiction of people too entrenched in their processes to act accordingly – a film without a reason to care; a detached film with very little to get excited about.
Unfolding in an unspecified Black African country fluent in French, the film covers a woman named Maria (Huppert) desperate to unload a coffee bean harvest in spite of the fact the elements, in the form of machine gun wielding child soldiers, are rapidly seeping their way across the country. The central idea isn't difficult to see, this notion revolving around the short sightedness of Capitalists too imbued in their own methods and getting a product out to think about themselves and those around them. The premise, equally resounding on paper, will see Huppert's character traipse around a desolate, Spaghetti Western-inflected terrain rife with war and suffering attempting to find people qualified to reap her harvest. Later on, she must maintain relationships with her former husband and son as well as care for an opposition soldier she's taken into the farm's care. The reality is, again, a piece as dry as the climate depicted within; a film as plodding in its depiction of plants being picked, grounded and plantation life in general being ploughed on with as anything else you could name. At least those Italian neo-realist films which were born out of the Second World War had an urgency to them, had something striking about them in spite similar grounds upon which to revolve around "nothing".
Things start ominously, beginning with the militarian threat in the form of a group of soldiers wading through a series of homes housed now only by the dead within the dark of the night. Things move to the past tense and we witness Maria hide from a truck full of these soldiers as it trundles down the dirt road, wary of the threat but more wary of the threat posed at her coffee beans back home: a fine crop which will be all but ruined because she cannot find the hands to do the required job out of this insurgency. Back at the plantation, frenzied requests from that of Maria's relatives fall on deaf ears. She, in spite of being white, sees herself as indigenous to this Black African nation and doesn't see as to why she should leave.
Her son, Manuel (Duvauchelle), makes for the one character who changes the most as the film progresses; leaving his shy, socially distanced existence for sake of shaving his head of hair; grabbing an assault shotgun and going out on the hunt for blacks after they humiliate him out in the fields during this war. Here is a depiction of something; a character study of someone beginning as one thing, having this outside agency in the form of the war come and affect him, before depicting this person going out and getting involved. Did the young man become enveloped by a hatred of Black Africans? Was it the potentially violent encounter that changed him, enrapturing him with a desire to actually taste violence? Is he destined to live out his days as a Neo-Nazi as of now?
The film, in fact, gets things so wrong so often that prior to his transformation it will need to induce drama from the meekest of places when it has Manuel naively venture out of the plantation in order to encounter these Blacks, much in the same way an English language 'slasher' film will perpetrate such things for shrill thrills. Where that aggrieves us there, we should not allow an auteur produced French language piece to fool us here? I read that Denis spent some time in Black French Africa during her childhood and people both speak and write of how film making can be a very personalised thing. If such a thing is true, where is the personalised stamp on her piece of work here? Where is the capturing of life in Black Africa from a white person's perspective, and why is it that such a person feels the need to depict life for such a woman in such a place during a time of war? Was there not enough drama in the first place? As far as French dramas go, White Material is a confused and wholly uninvolving effort.
Unfolding in an unspecified Black African country fluent in French, the film covers a woman named Maria (Huppert) desperate to unload a coffee bean harvest in spite of the fact the elements, in the form of machine gun wielding child soldiers, are rapidly seeping their way across the country. The central idea isn't difficult to see, this notion revolving around the short sightedness of Capitalists too imbued in their own methods and getting a product out to think about themselves and those around them. The premise, equally resounding on paper, will see Huppert's character traipse around a desolate, Spaghetti Western-inflected terrain rife with war and suffering attempting to find people qualified to reap her harvest. Later on, she must maintain relationships with her former husband and son as well as care for an opposition soldier she's taken into the farm's care. The reality is, again, a piece as dry as the climate depicted within; a film as plodding in its depiction of plants being picked, grounded and plantation life in general being ploughed on with as anything else you could name. At least those Italian neo-realist films which were born out of the Second World War had an urgency to them, had something striking about them in spite similar grounds upon which to revolve around "nothing".
Things start ominously, beginning with the militarian threat in the form of a group of soldiers wading through a series of homes housed now only by the dead within the dark of the night. Things move to the past tense and we witness Maria hide from a truck full of these soldiers as it trundles down the dirt road, wary of the threat but more wary of the threat posed at her coffee beans back home: a fine crop which will be all but ruined because she cannot find the hands to do the required job out of this insurgency. Back at the plantation, frenzied requests from that of Maria's relatives fall on deaf ears. She, in spite of being white, sees herself as indigenous to this Black African nation and doesn't see as to why she should leave.
Her son, Manuel (Duvauchelle), makes for the one character who changes the most as the film progresses; leaving his shy, socially distanced existence for sake of shaving his head of hair; grabbing an assault shotgun and going out on the hunt for blacks after they humiliate him out in the fields during this war. Here is a depiction of something; a character study of someone beginning as one thing, having this outside agency in the form of the war come and affect him, before depicting this person going out and getting involved. Did the young man become enveloped by a hatred of Black Africans? Was it the potentially violent encounter that changed him, enrapturing him with a desire to actually taste violence? Is he destined to live out his days as a Neo-Nazi as of now?
The film, in fact, gets things so wrong so often that prior to his transformation it will need to induce drama from the meekest of places when it has Manuel naively venture out of the plantation in order to encounter these Blacks, much in the same way an English language 'slasher' film will perpetrate such things for shrill thrills. Where that aggrieves us there, we should not allow an auteur produced French language piece to fool us here? I read that Denis spent some time in Black French Africa during her childhood and people both speak and write of how film making can be a very personalised thing. If such a thing is true, where is the personalised stamp on her piece of work here? Where is the capturing of life in Black Africa from a white person's perspective, and why is it that such a person feels the need to depict life for such a woman in such a place during a time of war? Was there not enough drama in the first place? As far as French dramas go, White Material is a confused and wholly uninvolving effort.