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Published: 01 July 2010
by DAN CARRIER

THE heat of a tropical, war-torn country leaps off the screen in such a way that after watching this, you can imagine lying underneath a whirring fan with the chirruping of cicadas in your ears. 

Made by French director Claire Denis, White Material tells the story of an unidentifiable African country as it goes through the painful throes of civil war. Our lead is Maria (Isabelle Huppert), with a lazy son who needs care and a useless ex-husband. Yet her maternal feelings are too strong for simply her biological offspring: Instead she feels a motherly yearning 

towards the earth she grows coffee on.

The director had a nomadic existence in her youth – born in Paris, her parents moved away when she was young and became archetypal French colonial workers in central Africa.  Denis’s understanding and sense of Africa makes this intense viewing.

As “rebel” troops move into the villages and towns around Maria’s coffee plantation, instead of doing what everyone else – white and black – have done, namely flee the impending violence, she is set on bringing her coffee crop in. Her workers have fled as waves of violence erupt, but Maria believes she can bring in the villagers nearby to help save her harvest. 

Cleverly, the film does not paint Maria as an exploita­tive beast nor her workers as uneducated Africans, as so often happens in western movies about the continent. It is about people, not stereotypes. The stench of death, of rotting corpses buzzed by flies as soldiers kill, also adds to the sense of a human tragedy unfolding, not of a political struggle. 

The decline and fall of empire is a topic that has been turned to time and again by film-makers: this has similarities to Rithy Panh’s The Sea Wall, released last year. Yet all too often, as in both these films, the white Europeans are cast as some kind of victims, pawns in a colonial powerplay. 

While you can feel sympathy for the leading character in this moving, intelligent, beautifully shot and well-acted film, the situation’s small-print means your sympathies eventually turn to the victims of colonialism, not the farmer trying to bring her coffee beans in.