As played by Isabelle Huppert in White Material, Claire Denis' grim, numinous postcard from post-colonial Africa, Maria Vial is an implacable, impossible force in the almost unbearably attenuated body of a young girl. Our first glimpse of Maria, a sylph with thin, floating limbs, finds her running across richly vegetated land in a pink cotton sundress, alone but somehow pursued.
The sun scours from above, while adobe reds and lush greens form an earthen, enveloping bed below. Between them the ethereal Huppert, with only a sheer veil of freckles between her radiant core and the rest of creation, doesn't seem to stand a chance. And yet we find her trapped, it is slowly revealed, because she has been willful to the point of delusion about the civil war path beating its way to her door. Maria's denial of the severity of the situation begs speculation: What else might she be denying? The question, once raised, remains poised above White Material and its incalculable heroine.
The opening images of Maria in flight follow a sequence in which a rebel known as "The Boxer" (Isaach De Bankole) is found dead in his hiding place; the same soldiers who made the discovery then barricade a young, tattooed white man into a flaming house. A string-intensive score (by Stuart Staples of Tindersticks) flows beneath the images, folding them into its mournful, forward propulsion. The maestro, it would seem, is tuning up for a requiem.
And yet forward propulsion isn't exactly forthcoming, at least not in the linear sense. Denis stitches back and forth in time to patch up certain blanks and leave others pointedly open. Although our introduction to The Boxer clearly marked his end, when we meet Maria her story has not yet reached its frenzied destination; she is still traveling. She's harangued by the locals and chided by the French officials -- they pepper her with first aid kits while shouting warnings from hovering aircrafts. Maria's sense of being is so closely tied to place that to leave it would mean an even more certain death than staying put. Denis does not go so far, as she did in Chocolat, the debut she set in her native Cameroon, to name the female protagonist "France," but the archetypal themes of otherness and expulsion are contrasted by the turbulent immediacy of the style.
Denis (who co-wrote the script with French author Marie NDiaye) does not name the country where Maria and her family have run a coffee plantation for two generations -- this is "Africa" -- but in its French heritage and references to child soldiers, civil war and coffee it would seem to be a West African mash of Cameroon and the blighted Sierra Leone. When her workers depart she hires others, endangering their lives and housing them in an appalling squat. "The Boxer," hunted by "the army," has come to the plantation to hide; the fact of his presence seems to radiate, seeping from the room like blood from his mortal wound.
Without the crutch of linearity, Denis builds tension and dismantles mystery methodically, using image and information to pulse and repulse in alternating measures. Is it the land Maria is dedicated to? The legacy? Or perhaps some misbegotten version of what a Parisian officer described to an Algerian rebel in Rachid Bouchareb's recent Outside the Law as "the grandeur of France"? Her husband, played by Christophe Lambert, is desperate to leave; her lazy son, played by Nicolas Duvauchelle, is ominously indifferent. Maria's opacity makes her willful determination to haul in one last crop seem strictly mercenary; eventually it feels more like a form of psychosis. When she appears the camera shadows Maria intuitively, paralleling her movements and sliding in and out of her perspective. The elliptical structure and impressionistic style (this is Denis's first collaboration with DP Yves Cape) suggest events being parsed within a consciousness, not a film. Though we are not strictly limited to Maria's point of view, the consciousness -- including its gaps -- is hers.
With Huppert as her paradoxical lightning rod, Denis courts class and colonial tensions until they fly apart in the last moments of the film. There is much to look at and admire in the meantime, and yet the film derives a risky share of its authority from allegorical generalities. By the end, when almost all is sacrificed to the ravenous bloodlust consuming the region, the lack of specificity in both character and situation leaves the film vulnerable to thematic misperception and tonal blunders. The latter are probably more problematic, as Denis is clearly operating in a tone-driven mode; negotiating the difficulties of representing the third world is secondary, and it shows.
"How could I show courage in France?" Maria says, by way of explaining her attraction to the life she leads in Africa. It's the most telling -- if not the most astonishing -- statement she makes, solipsistic in the extreme. The continent and its discontents have served mainly to set Maria into relief. Careful in her wishes as in everything else, she seems to prefer romantic martyrdom over, say, an indeterminate life in globalized Paris, or even her family's boring well-being.
Earlier in the film Maria is callously hustled -- and treated as a stranger, a scrap of white material -- by locals she has dealt with for years. "I know all of you," she says, calling them out by name. It's a beautifully executed scene, weaving terror and incredulity so tightly they emerge as one, consuming response. It also establishes a central question of the conflict -- and the colonial -- mentality: Were these men transformed by a cause or just opportunity? Perhaps, like Maria, they were only waiting for the right time and place to show some courage of their own.