White Material Claire Denis
Claire Denis's film, co-authored with Marie Ndiaye, is an encounter between the worlds of these two artists: Marie Ndiaye brings his style and haunting borer, his way of describing the confinement of his characters in a hellish and inexorable inner logic, the strangeness of reality seeping every pore of the story, who fled with internal ruminations of the characters. Claire Denis, who had an African childhood and masterfully filmed in Africa Chocolate, looks at reports of a couple, what's happening in the margins of civilized society. In White Material , the fusion of documentary and vein romantic vein, the balance between the mental and the physical is a natural and powerful way through the history of Maria and her family of coffee producers in Africa, caught in the upheavals of violent decolonization.
The director films in a very subtle these beings trapped, whatever side they belong to. Thus, child soldiers are filmed like never before: they are often reduced to the hyphen that joins the two qualifiers, they are no longer living beings and multiple but an abstract category, almost an essence, which carries with it a mass of emotions dripping. In the film by Claire Denis no such thing: it deconstructs the category to reveal the life she stays away to send us new sensations: the children are filmed as dry and naturally as the rest: what are their actions their draws, their eyes firm and not the background predetermined fear and cruelty, that counts most. It is their group outings of their hideouts in the bush, not their small and imperceptible light in the house of Vival, their lust to dreamed objects, and in the midst of all this gentle feline that lightness and grace of this violence and deaf elliptical springs sometimes their hands, holding machetes or guns, improbable as extensions of their members as yet unformed. All that Claire Denis film with great delicacy, choreographed movement, an art installation that disrupts the temporal and geographical landmarks, which makes things and uncertain course of events, like being in the presence of a nightmare .
The filmmaker could not have chosen best actress Isabelle Huppert to play the role of Maria. Huppert excels to embody the characters contained in the madness, women and compulsive obsessive, but madness is fully retracted, the gnawing of the interior and creating a fire that burns them. Fire under the ice, a haunted face and yet still were almost certain tics and tremors that the actress has managed to fully contain and elsewhere who have become his trademark. She often embodied characters who say no, that does not yield to the obstacles but whose obstinacy is almost annoying by dint of being blind. In the film by Claire Denis, this stubbornness comes from a kind of transferring Maria believes belong to the land of Africa as much as blacks who were born there. And indeed, Claire Denis films so magnificent that membership, to make it credible and anchor Maria in the physical reality of the land of Africa on his moped, Maria-Isabel offers her face to the wind, her red hair of same color as the ears and the land surrounding it, and this harmony is what is the tragic story of this woman who feels totally melted into the landscape and the colors so that all combine to drive away in violence and erase his presence. But the beauty of the film and its terrible force is to show his obsession to remain in the country to enroll in the plan and, by dint of hard work, stubbornness, of tireless work. Maria never stops moving, mean stop its eviction from the land, yet this activity is what leads to the loss. In a truck, a motorbike, pushing a wheelbarrow, clearing land, digging with his own hands, beating all stages of production of coffee, she insists on marking the land, the landscape, the film with his presence . There is Duras in the film: the woman is the mother A dam cons the Pacific, as crazy as the mother, and also grinder drivelling, pushing her children to the confines of loss and delusions, revealing themselves in the violence of the fatality.
There is also a great feeling of unease that emerges from the film, this feel almost uncomfortable and frightening to witness still a nightmare in which things and characters move ever but to return to a starting point, in a move absurd, circular and pointless. The entire film unfolds in a kind of flashback flowing, fluid, framed at the beginning and the end film by a guy filming and editing very different, and hatched elliptical. Between the first and last scenes in real time, so to speak, there is another space-time, the reality of a crumbling, leaking and flowing with the movements and movements of characters.
