White Material

Claire Denis went back to the African settings of her childhood and of her debut Chocolat for White Material (2009), a searing drama about the violent end of colonialism. It premiered at Venice and Toronto, reunited her with the writer Marie NDiaye, and gave Isabelle Huppert one of her most ferocious roles.

Huppert plays Maria Vial, the plantation owner whose refusal to leave shades from courage into dangerous denial as the country falls apart around her. Denis and her longtime cinematographer Agnès Godard shoot in heat-soaked, fragmentary images and keep geography and chronology unclear, so that the world seems to be coming apart in the cutting as well. Denis will not make Maria a heroine or a simple villain. She watches instead the obstinacy and blindness of a European clinging to a place that is no longer hers, if it ever was.

Critics admired its formal daring and Huppert's fearless performance, and many read it as one of the great films about the legacy of empire. White Material is hypnotic, oblique and unsettling. It shows Denis's sensory, elliptical style at full strength, along with the preoccupation with France's colonial entanglements that runs through her whole career, and Huppert's performance holds the fragments together. It is a portrait of denial in the face of history, and a major work from one of world cinema's most uncompromising directors.