WHITE MATERIAL: OLD COLONIALISTS

There exists a vivid concentration of the colour red that immediately conveys the violence and political upheaval characterising director Claire Denis' film White Material (2009). The film's central protagonist is a red-haired French woman named Maria Vial. She manages a coffee plantation somewhere in an unidentified African country. A simmering guerilla war between government forces and rebel soldiers has erupted. The consequences of this war for the general population are devastating. The local pharmacy is protected by armed guard. Plantation workers abandon their employment in fear of their lives. Pre-pubescent children have organised into a ramshackle army led by a freedom fighter named 'The Boxer'. And the obsessive Maria Vial makes desperate attempts to employ workers for the purpose of harvesting her ripe coffee beans. Beneath the semi-tropical vegetation of equatorial Africa there is spread a viscous, red soil. The suspicion is that a blood-lust will soon devour the inhabitants of this country, along with its French colonialist past.

The film's story is revealed in flashback by a sequence of elliptical and impressionistic vignettes. It begins with Maria Vial fleeing along that same red-soiled road, then hitching a lift upon a micro-bus overloaded with black Africans similarly intent on escape. As director, Denis makes few concessions to her audience. Her camera is a dispassionate voyeur that hovers above and around Maria Vial, thereby channeling the emotional extremity of this situation into her petite face. Denis also refuses to make explicit for the audience the film's embroidered temporal shifts. Instead, when the opening scene digresses to a different locality and Vial is overwhelmed by a peace-keeping helicopter whose occupants sternly advise her to depart, Denis assumes that the shift in action and emotional intensity will substantiate the narrative and its gradual re-telling of events that have already occurred. This is a risky strategy. But it is also an assumption upon the director's part that her audience is intelligent enough to be engaged by her film-making. Given Denis' directorial style, as this was evidenced by the impressionistic beauty of Beau Travail (1999), Denis' assumption is both fair and precise. For those members of the audience unprepared for White Material and its slippery descent into an incongruous past, well, (Denis suggests), better luck next time...

Arranged with minimal and deft austerity, the prismatic relationships that comprise this film are selectively revealed. Some are acutely personal, such as the relationship between Maria Vial and her indolent son Manuel, who aspires to nothing other than remaining in his bedroom for each entire day. Resentful of his mother's pampering and perhaps, her decision to raise him in a country that is at best ambivalent to France, he is only mobilised after two child soldiers unsuccessfully attempt his assassination. In response, Manuel shaves his head in mohawk style, steals his father's pump action shotgun, and seeks revenge. In doing so, he also joins the same group of rebels that contain the same two child soldiers who attempted to murder him. Psychotic, if not completely insane, Manuel's revenge is here inverted upon his mother. Elsewhere, other relationships are metaphorical, and indicate the presence of an exasperated France attempting to cope with the consequences of its destructive colonialist intent. Maria Vial's father-in-law, (the original and remaining owner of the coffee plantation), still resides on the estate. Beset by a medical condition that requires constant medication and regular resuscitation, his relationship to the deluded Vial is a grim reminder of the post-colonialist condition. Wizened, weary and disabled, France is not alone among other colonial powers that have been unable to recognise and accept the inevitable demise of their once proud traditions. 

But Denis does not labour this point and neither does she seek to make a patronising observation upon Franco-African relations. White Material remains a film about good people trapped by circumstances partly of their own making, that have since spun out of control. Intentionally or otherwise, it specifically resembles the subject matter of both Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1902), and its recontextualisation as the film Apocalypse Now (1979). But rather than concentrating the insanity of such a situation in one symbolic and indomitable character, scriptwriters Denis and Marie NDiaye propose a decentralised vision of madness. Most if not all of the characters of White Material are empathetic. That is, the situation each is embroiled within is a frightening outbreak of insanity completely beyond their control. But Denis is careful to show that the actions of each, when combined, are intrinsic to that same outbreak that now threatens their lives. From the pharmacists who are murdered by rebels for the purpose of consuming pharmaceuticals to a rabble rousing disc-jockey who himself is murdered by government troops for inciting insurrection, each character in this film is infected  by insanity. No one character is responsible for the ensuing political upheaval. But each in some way must take responsibility for the murderous actions that shall consume them. Even French colonialism seems innocent in this respect. Defiant, desperate, and deluded, these broad characteristics are concentrated within the persona of Maria Vial. In spite of her ignorance and stupidity, she remains a baffled individual attempting to cope with a situation that is obviously beyond her control. 

Eventually, Vial is successful in her attempt at employing labourers for the purpose of harvesting her coffee. Meanwhile, her ex-husband Andre' secretly negotiates the sale of the plantation with the local corrupt mayor. Andre' is sensible enough to realise that the surrounding anarchy will soon engulf all concerned. But he is also 'in debt' to the mayor. The details of this debt are intentionally vague. But the inference is that it is at once financial, personal, and metaphorical. Andre' owes money to the local mayor in the same way that the aura of corruption surrounding their mutually dependent relationship reflects the historical trajectory of France and its colonialist occupation of this African country. It also emerges that in the past, Maria Vial herself has been engaged in an intimate relationship with the mayor. Whether this intimacy occurred prior to the separation between Vial and her husband Andre' remains opaque. But it is clear that her relationship with the local mayor has been one characterised by pleasure for the purpose of appeasement, persuasion and pacification. This grubby triumvirate appears to have been a necessary requirement for maintaining a settled relationship with the local black political structure. But it also indicates France and its latent vulnerability in relation to its colonialist occupation. The sustenance of unqualified power requires a Faustian pact that simultaneously belittles and corrodes the desire to dominate other people, or, another country. In White Material, an authoritarian regime is calcified by the decadent aspiration of what initially appeared to be a mission of virtue. 

 But the presence of such pathos in the film is somehow diminished by its characterisations and the dynamics of its personal relationships. Here, White Material is less an aesthetic experience and more a document. Denis' camera is often situated behind the character of Maria Vial, following her as she scampers about in desperation. During one potentially deplorable scene child soldiers consume scattered pharmaceuticals like candy. But rather than moral exasperation, the scene induces a sly suspicion relating to the poisonous presence of propaganda and how this is used to manipulate children. Denis' aloof camera can be viewed as a fault within the film, and her unwillingness to engage in emotional favoritism will alienate some audiences. But if the underlying circumstances that create intractable sociopolitical situations are to be illuminated, then this requires an absence of ideology. White Material is a brutal examination of the delusions of grandeur implicit in French colonialism as these are related by a woman who is incapable of acknowledging that her presence in an unspecified African country is despised, and about to end. 

White Material
Director: Claire Denis, Writers: Claire Denis & Marie NDiaye, Performers: Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Lambert, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Isaach de Bankole', Adele Ado, Michel Subor, William Nadylam & David Gozlan, Music: Stuart Staples, Cinematography: Yves Cape, Editing: Yann Dedet, Long Play series, extended run, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Jan. 14 - Feb. 2, Melb.