White Material: Isabelle Huppert Gets Kicked Out of Africa

IFC Films

Huppert as the last of her colonial tribe.

Details

Opens at Harvard Exit, Fri., Dec. 10. Not rated. 108 minutes.

Related Content

• Every Man for Himself
  December 29, 2010
• SIFF Week 1: Picks & Pans
  May 18, 2011
• Of Gods and Men: Terrorists Versus Monks in Algeria
  March 23, 2011
• Cannes Report, Part II
  May 26, 2009
• 35 Shots of Rum: Claire Denis by Way of Ozu
  November 4, 2009

More About

• Isabelle Huppert
• Claire Denis
• Isaach De Bankole

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Claire Denis' tense, convulsive White Material is a portrait of change and a thing of terrible beauty. The time is unspecified. The subject is the collapse of an unnamed West African state, and the protagonist, Maria, a French settler unflinchingly played by Isabelle Huppert, is the proprietress of a family-run coffee plantation. A composition in continuous crisis and continual dread, White Material begins at the end, with Maria's plantation in flames and a revolutionary hero known as the Boxer (Isaach De Bankolé) an already cold corpse. Flashbacks are indistinguishable from flash-forwards. Rogue soldiers rule the roads; helicopters dispatched by evacuating French forces drop useless "survival kits." The dying Boxer scrambles through the bush to find refuge on a doomed plantation; meanwhile, his activities are the subject of menacing radio transmissions issued by a mysterious DJ who also promises that "for [European] white material, the party is over." Astonishingly self-contained and remarkably girlish, Huppert anchors the movie. Maria is impossibly stubborn, apparently tireless, and totally fearless. She is resourceful enough to run a plantation by herself, yet can't face the reality of her situation. The sense of final days becomes that of final moments, with a particular way of life inexorably sloshing down the drain. As the movie's protagonist is the only European woman we see, race is continuously apparent—she is a foreign body being expelled by her host in a bloody purge, just a bit of "white material" borne off in the raging current of history.