White Material

Directed by Claire Denis

(Not Rated)

***

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Chocolat director Claire Denis returns to Africa in White Material, but “it’s not the place she knew as a child,” said Sura Wood in The Hollywood Reporter. Instead, the filmmaker’s “taut, unforgettable” new French-language drama transpires in a “ruined paradise,” an unnamed African country destroyed by poverty and human savagery. Isabelle Huppert stars as a white plantation owner desperate to hold on to her land despite encroaching civil war, and she is as “hard and unforgiving as the patch of land” upon which her character has staked her existence. Unruffled by the dead-eyed child soldiers who surround her, she refuses to return to a comfortable life in France, said Jay Weissberg in Variety. Rather than sentimentalize the continent, Denis portrays Africa as a “kind of drug—intoxicating yet perilous—that never leaves the system.” She “wants us to feel the character in limbo” and see the pull Africa has over Huppert’s foolhardy heroine, said Scott Tobias in the A.V. Club. It’s not always easy to understand her decisions, but the experience of piecing together her motivations “only feels like work if you resist it.”