White Material

Claire Denis returned to the African settings of her childhood and her debut Chocolat with White Material (2009), a searing drama of colonialism's violent end. Premiered at Venice and Toronto, it reunited the director 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 disintegrates around her. Denis, working with her longtime cinematographer Agnès Godard, shoots in heat-soaked, fragmentary images, eschewing clear geography and chronology to convey a world coming apart. She declines to make Maria either heroine or simple villain, observing 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, reading it as one of the great films about the legacy of empire. Hypnotic, oblique and unsettling, White Material exemplifies Denis's sensory, elliptical style and her career-long preoccupation with France's colonial entanglements. It is a major work from one of world cinema's most uncompromising directors, and a portrait of denial in the face of history's tide. Huppert's ferocious central performance and Denis's fragmentary, heat-soaked imagery make it one of the great films about the violent end of empire, and a major work from one of world cinema's most uncompromising directors.