Movies We Love... "White Material" (2009)

"White Material" (2009)  directed by Claire Denis

Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) is trying to get home, to a coffee plantation that she runs in an unnamed, French speaking, African country.  Wandering the dusty African countryside in sandals and a pink dress, she hitches a ride on a bus packed with people who look disturbed, frightened, furtive.  Are they refugees?  This is the opening of a haunting film by director Claire Denis.  With mounting tension and suspense, the story of how Maria came to be wandering far from home is told in obscure, elliptical flashbacks that seem almost like remnants of a disturbing dream.

The country where she has lived and worked, and raised her son, for over twenty years is in turmoil.  An army of rebels, many of them children wielding rudimentary weapons, wanders the countryside, and the Vial plantation and it's "white material," food, gasoline, money, etc. is the magnet that draws them.  At the same time, uniformed government troops, looking no less fierce and unorganized seem to threaten from another front.  A fugitive we know only as "the Boxer" (Isaach de Bankolé), is hiding out, wounded, in the Vial house.  In short, the country is coming apart, and Madame Vial, having ignored numerous exhortations to get out while she can, has now become trapped in a descending spiral of disruption and violence.

Though Maria seems at times to be heroic, we get hints that she may be part of the problem  that has led the country to such an unsettled state.  The workers and foremen have fled. Maria's ex-husband (Christophe Lambert) is selling the farm out from under her.  Her  father-in-law (Michel Subor) wanders the corridors of the plantation house in a bathrobe, and seems to survive on pills and oxygen.  

Maria's own son (Nicholas Duvauchelle) is a tattooed slacker who can't summon the energy to get out of bed.  While allowing no criticism of him, she seems to admit in one scene that she "botched" raising him.  He in turn seems detached from life until he begins to display a growing fascination with the swirling anarchy that surrounds them.  Something is very wrong here, and by the time the movie wends it way to its disturbing conclusion, we are left devastated by the emptiness of the moral landscape and the haphazardness of the understated violence.  Hell has come to earth, and we wonder, can any of us be saved?

This amazing film is an unsettling masterpiece and does now allow the viewer to make easy judgments.