I saw the last Claire Denis movie I saw, 35 Shots of Rum ( despite the title, it’s not the follow-up to Cocktail) which I saw in a New York Movie Theatre with my super-cool friend Mary Manning, who always knows about the coolest movies. I didn’t exactly like it, mostly because I didn’t understand anyone’s motivations for doing what they did, but it felt nice to watch–it was languid. White Material is languid and has character motivations that are hard to understand and that made it incredibly suspenseful. It’s about some white coffee-plantation owners in Africa who are amidst a coup attempt, perhaps, it’s never quite outlined–there is a rebel uprising and a government crackdown and both are incredibly brutal in their methods. You don’t side with either–though the rebel force is the gnarly, drugged out group of child soldiers, who are as brutal and scary as the regular Army–but it’s more sad because you know that child soldiers are real and this is an accurate portrayal of their situation. That they are marauding and violent and on drugs and terrifying, but then, also, still they are children, stuffing themselves on cookies and junkfood like any unsupervised kid would.
The kids are only a side note to the movie, one of the main destabilizing forces. How Denis frames everything keeps us as confused as the white characters at the center of the story, who are all different equations of willful and stupid. No one here is really a protagonist, though Isabelle Huppert’s charcter is almost one, but watching her is like a horror film in itself, all her denial of whats really going on. She tells another character the reason she doesn’t leave and go back to France is that in France she would be nobody, essentially, she would not have a chance to be brave. She thinks of Africa as her homeland but all of the Africans she comes in contact with remind her, it’s different for her, she is white and she is rich and they are not in the same boat–she tells her houseman, her housekeeper, her workers, she cries into the arms of a woman who is fleeing for her life. But the whole time you can see the chaos and horror creeping her way and she denies it, flatly. You recoil, just waiting for whatever vigilante menace is coming to her. She’s totally thefinal girl except the way she is able to confront the killer is not brave how she thinks, she is stubborn, dumb and magically thinking–but thinking she’s surefooted and doing the right thing, if she can only just harvest the coffee, everything will be put right. The country will not be ravaged, she will not die, her pig son will return to being the sweet baby he clearly has not been in a while. She is like a woman in a Didion story, minding her ritual while her life splinters.
Then, the end, a surprise and not a surprise. The sole extra footage on the DVD is basically the 4 scenes leading up to the very sudden ending, which almost explain what happens. I think that Denis took it out so that the end is basically a big question mark. The movie works metaphorically, but also as a straight narrative arc about colonialism. I know this blog doesn’t have a ratings system, so I can only really compare it to other colonialist narratives–the only one I know well is Babar. As far as the two go, Babar is less intense, less murder, to be sure, though both are oblique and have a distinct Pollyanna storyline within them.