Powerful

Perfect cast and a good story

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

In French colonial Africa, Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) is struggling to finish the coffee bean harvest. The rebels are approaching. French forces are leaving. Local have turned to banditry and her workers have mostly abandoned her. The African mayor bullies André Vial (Christopher Lambert) to get his father to sell the plantation. Maria has their white son Manuel and André has his half-African son Jose. Maria stubbornly refuses to leave the harvest even after Manuel is stripped naked by a couple of boys. Manuel starts to deteriorate mentally. Maria discovers wounded rebel fighter Le Boxeur in her barn.Isabelle Huppert embodies a fierce interior and stubbornness. The family's varying reaction to their situation can be mind-boggling. There is real tension but also frustration with Maria. These are maddening characters in a maddening world.

Isabelle Huppert plays Maria Vial, a white farmer living in an unnamed African country. With her ex husband, father and son, she leads a cloistered, privileged existence, overseeing her coffee plantations while talk of civil war warbles on the radios. As conflicts escalate, Maria's plantation workers abandon her, some fearing for their lives, others deciding to at last cast off the shackles of Colonialism. As African leaders and mobs converge on her plantation, Maria remains fixed, refusing to abandon the continent. To reveal more about the plot would be to dilute the horrors that unfold.Though director Claire Denis made better films with "35 Shots of Rum" and "The Intruder", "White Material" does well to balance the lingering afflictions of colonialism and French occupation with Africa's own betrayals of its independence. Nevertheless, the film suffers from a conventional, obvious narrative, the result of Denis' struggles to condense "Big Themes" down into some manageable, approachable structure. Like most of these films, "White Material" also treats Africa and Africans in a somewhat condescending manner.Incidentally, this current wave of French and African (though often also French co-financed) pro-Africana films ("Bamako", "White Material", "Munyurangabo" etc) echoes a similar wave during the early sixties. After and while the British Empire was being disbanded, British and Italian directors released numerous "anti-Empire", "anti-Colonial" films, one, "Guns at Batasi", strongly resembling Denis' work here.8/10 - Ranges from powerful to far too conventional. See "Le Grand Blanc De Lambarene". Worth one viewing.

Isabelle Huppert (along with Helen Mirren, Juliette Binoche and Laura Linnie) is one of my five favorite actors (the only male on the list being Bill Murray), so I had no doubt that she could realistically play a colonial coffee farmer trying to hang on in soon-to-be post-colonial Africa.From the opening scene, there seems to be no doubt that things will turn out badly for Huppert's character. This is, after all, not war-torn Algeria portrayed in "Battle of Algiers", where the French are going to fight tenaciously to hold onto "their" land and then suddenly fold and get out of Dodge City. This is sub-Saharan Africa, and the politicians back in France know that it will be more profitable, and maybe even easier for them, to turn their colonies over to local African dictators, who can then be bought off for the benefit of French corporations and politicians. It's a win-win situation for everyone...except for the vast majority of Africans and Huppert's character. Perhaps we could let the French off the hook by saying that France couldn't have prepared their African colonies for independence if they had wanted to. But the French certainly did nothing positive in their colonies during their stay or after they left (the best we can say is that the Belgians in the Congo were much worst).This is life in the land of barely living, where the local African warlords have no background in or time for the niceties of "civilized" brutality and exploitation a la française. Huppert seems oddly out of place, a relatively nice colonist who perhaps thinks naively that she can trade on her relative niceness to survive the new and very ugly reality about to engulf her. But she is completely out of touch with the reality. She could choose to leave, unlike the Africans who work on her plantation. But she somehow thinks she has no choice but to stay even as child-soldiers wander across the countryside around here.I mainly saw "White Material" mainly because I like Isabelle Huppert acting, because one seldom sees a movie filmed in sub-Saharan Africa and because I had read Louroma's "Les Soleils des Indépendance" dealing with Ivory Coast. But I spent most of the movie hoping that when her time came, Huppert's character would take one carefully-aimed shot to head to relieve her suffering.A couple of other points. The Supplement interview with Claire Denis is well worth seeing (Isabelle Huppert's interview is okay; unfortunately the disk wouldn't let me watch the interview with Isaach de Bankolé). I was glad that the child-soldiers were not shown committing a lot of the violence in the film. And as Denis points out, the local actors were very good. I also know that not all African countries are the same, but I also wondered about whether there was a lot of violence against women during the conflict in Ivory Coast like is currently occurring every day in Congo. Still I was glad that violence against women was not shown; it wouldn't have added to the film's message or effect.

WHITE MATERIAL (the term is defined as all things owned by or being 'white' in a black culture) is a strange little film by the highly respected Claire Denis who wrote (with Marie N'Diaye and Lucie Borleteau) and directed this rather timeless, non-specifically placed study of disintegration of family and life somewhere in Africa. Perhaps not giving a time frame or more information about the politics of the place where this film takes place is meant to metaphorical, but for many viewers it will make the story more of a conundrum than is necessary. Maria Vial (the extraordinary actress Isabelle Huppert) runs a coffee plantation owned by her father-in-law Henri (Michel Subor): the plantation has seen better economic days and Maria's former husband André (Christophe Lambert) who not only offers no help to the plantation but is trying to sell it before it goes bankrupt: Andrés also has taken another woman Lucie (Adèle Ado) and has a young son by her. Maria's only child Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle) is a tattooed loser and probably his unstable mind is due to drug abuse. So it is Maria by herself that is in charge of the plantation. There is a political uprising with rebels, led by Boxer (Isaach De Bankolé), destroying all the white material seen to be the evil of the country. Maria sides with Boxer, protecting him from the ruling corrupt government, and as the people Maria has employed on her plantation flee because of the insurrection, Maria is repeatedly warned to return to France - an idea she finds repugnant and will do anything to save her land. She gathers a few frightened people to harvest her coffee beans, but as she is processing the beans she uncovers a severed goat head in the beans - a sign of doom. Maria must fight to save her home and in the end her choices are altered by a vile deed that shows how far she has fallen in her attempt to change her personal destiny: she has lost her business, her son has gone completely mad, and her former husband and her father-in-law fail to aid her plight. Even giving aid to Boxer, the chief of the rebels, fails to alter her plight. The film is confusing in that there is not enough history or information about place so that the message seems to be that all of Africa is always in turmoil and that the conflict between blacks and whites is a constant. Real history does not support that act and the reality of the people of that continent deserve better, Isabelle Huppert is always outstanding, but even in this situation her character is a bit monotonous. The musical by Stuart Staples is outstanding, possibly the best aspect of this film that could have been much better. In French with English subtitles. Grady Harp