Isabelle Huppert brings a fierce performance to "White Material," as she desperately hangs on to the shreds of the past. She owns a coffee plantation somewhere in Africa, but the men and women who have worked there for generations are aflame with the fires of change and they seem to care little whether the change is for the better.
French director Clare Denis, who wrote the screenplay with Marie N'Diaye, opens strongly, showing Huppert, in a well-worn pink dress on a dusty road in the African heat, desperately trying to get a ride home to the plantation. When a truck driver allows her to struggle for space among the crowded natives in the rear, she hangs on with a desperate effort.
There is revolt in the unnamed nation, and like so many similar situations in the real world, we never learn who is fighting whom, and for what, or why. Guerilla fighters, some of them only children, are empowered by weapons, but at the end of the day, they remain children.
Huppert is trying to find enough workers to bring in the harvest, and while she does endorse the revolt, she is friendly with the men who used to work for her, like a revolutionary named The Boxer (Isaach De Bankole), who needs a hideout. And there are relationships with her former husband (Christophe Lambert), her son (Nicolas Duvauchelle) and the plantation manager (Michel Subor). The acting is first-rate, and Denis directs in a manner that emphasizes the heat, the confusion and the feeling that the world is changing.
White Material opens today at the Plaza Frontenac
—Joe