08 · 01 · 24

Claire Denis and WHITE MATERIAL: Morelia 2022

Rafael Aviña

One of the most captivating attendees at the 20th edition of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) was, without a doubt, the charismatic, simple, and talented French filmmaker Claire Denis (Let the Sunshine in, High Life, With Love and Fury), a special guest in October 2022, when several of her exceptional works were screened. On the 25th of that month, White Material (2009) was screened. Daniela Michel, founder and general director of the festival, introduced her as follows: “It is a pleasure to welcome a filmmaker we greatly admire... one of the greats in the history of cinema”, at a screening that was also attended by Ava Cahen, Artistic Director of the Critics' Week at Cannes.

Claire Denis (Paris, 1946), educated in Cameroon and other French African colonies, assisted filmmakers such as Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch. She soon became an atypical filmmaker capable of proposing unusual resolutions in several traditional genres such as melodrama, suspense, comedy, or documentary. She created true cult films in stories of madness, sexuality, and violence, without falling into the clichés imposed by an increasingly globalized and uniform cinema.

Graduated from the Parisian IDHEC in 1971, she debuted in 1988 with Chocolat, a sort of autobiographical story, centered on a young French girl who returns several years later to Cameroon, where she spent her childhood. She followed with No Fear, No Die (1990), the story of a couple of African immigrants hidden in the basement of a speakeasy who promote illegal cockfights. Later, the documentary Jacques Rivette, Le veilleur (1990) is about the remarkable filmmaker of the French new wave, the author of The Nun.

In 1993, Claire Denis made I Can't Sleep, a thriller inspired by the criminal case of Thierry Paulin, a homosexual, transvestite, and serial killer of old women, who died of AIDS and spread terror in Paris in the late eighties. It is a hyperlink film with marginal characters cornered by a xenophobic, racist, and, petulant society. In 1996, she directed the dramatic comedy Nenette et Boni, about a young cook in a traveling pizzeria in Marseille, and his pregnant sister. This story explores themes such as motherhood and fraternity.

In Beau Travail (1999), she explores the virile environments, violence, and latent homosexuality in the military environment, based on a group of cadets stationed in the French Foreign Legion in East Africa. It is the story of Sergeant Galoup and his unhealthy obsession with his harsh commander due to the intrusive presence of a popular recruit. Two years later, the director focused her batteries on a dark love story with elements close to Roman Polanski (Repulsion, Bitter Moon) and Freud (Theories of Libido).

Starring Vincent Gallo, Beatriz Dalle, and Tricia Vessey, Trouble Every Day (2001) is a small gore study on paranoia, blood, and flesh, in the story of a young woman who develops a perverse pleasure for human cannibalism, in a film far from generic formulas. It is not exempt from bloody graphics, worthy of Dario Argento, as it is shown in The Intruder (2004), the story of an old man who, after spending all his savings on a transplant, travels to Tahiti to look for his son, whom he abandoned some time ago.

With White Material, Denis returned once again to Africa to tell a story of loneliness, horror, and exclusionary racism. The white individuals are derogatorily labeled as "White Material." They find themselves engulfed in a cycle of violence stemming from poverty, lack of knowledge, and despair during the turbulent times of an internal uprising. This situation leads children to wield machetes and the military to harm these very children, while a remarkable French woman, Isabelle Huppert, strives tirelessly to maintain her coffee plantation.

There is no hint of exoticism or visual extravagance here, unlike films like Out of Africa (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1985) with its strong female characters, or the brutal elements disguised as thrillers as seen in Blood Diamond (dir. Edward Zwick, 2006) Instead, this film is contemplative and intimate, portraying the harsh realities of violence and racism in a nation under constant threat. The white French population feels invincible, as depicted through scenes of humiliation faced by the protagonist's teenage son and the sacrifices she must make to leave her homeland.

In addition to Isabelle Huppert's outstanding performance, the film's intense original music, composed by Stuart Staples, is also noteworthy. His deep tones create an almost surreal atmosphere within a story where various characters, pushed to their limits, intersect: a woman who refuses to leave a country in civil war, her ex-husband (Christopher Lambert) who plans to sell the farm without her knowledge, their indifferent white son, the sick grandfather, or the renegade fugitive they call Boxer (Isaach De Bankolé), who becomes a role model for young people, despite their naivety and aggression. Claire Denis presents a study of obsession and racist attitudes towards foreigners, depicting a family in crisis whose everyday life unravels in the face of societal horrors.