A period piece inspired by her own childhood as the daughter of a French colonial official in Africa, Claire Denis’s first feature film, 1988’s Chocolat, concerned the domestic arrangements of a white family in Cameroon, particularly the mother’s fraught, ambiguously intense relationship with their servant (Isaach de Bankolé). The director returned to the continent in the late 90s and late 2000s, to probe other semipermeable bubbles between the West and now-postcolonial Africa. In Beau Travail, the military drills of the French Foreign Legion betray a repressed homoeroticism in a dazzling desert environment that stands in for an exotic and forbidden Other; White Material jumped to the private sector, and back to the nuclear family, as Isabelle Huppert’s hold on her ancestral coffee plantation was threatened by the specter of reappropriation. Now, 16 years deeper into the era of economic globalism, comes Denis’ fourth African film, The Fence, shot in Senegal, about another fracturing homestead in an extractive industry.
Horn (Matt Dillon), the American foreman at a construction site (soon to be taken over by the Chinese) in a region crisscrossed by pipelines, awaits the arrival of his young English wife (Mia McKenna-Bruce), while smoothing over the death of a worker – a common-enough occurrence, apparently, complicated this time because of the involvement of Horn’s prodigal second-in-command (Tom Blyth). And the victim’s brother, or at least a man claiming to be the victim’s brother – played by Denis’ eternal muse de Bankolé – arrives at the site just after sunset, standing just outside the razor wire-topped fence under the gunsights of the native sentries, demanding the body.
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Sixteen years since White Material – 37 years since Chocolate – represents a long time in our thinking about the legacy of imperialism and the politics of representation, a long time to reflect on how apologetic a European filmmaker must be about burrowing into the dualities of belonging and unbelonging implicit in the white colonial experience, so it’s perhaps a necessary disclaimer that early in the film Blyth’s character sings along to Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning” apparently oblivious to the song’s relevance to his situation: “It belongs to them/Let’s give it back.” In English, as three of Denis’ last four films have been, this is a very blunt joke, as is the slogan on the workers’ safety vests: “Paving the way to a greener future.”
Denis is otherwhere less didactic, and certainly less than inclined to cede the floor. As in White Material, in which he played a wounded revolutionary, de Bankolé is a ghost at the feast for the film’s white characters, unsettling still and immaculately dressed as Dillon bargains, badgers, threats and wheedles from inside the wire. The script, adapted from a French play by Bernard-Marie Koltès, retains a certain staginess in translation: Dillon in particular seems to be pronouncing every comma as he and de Bankolé face off from opposite sides of the titular fence, which one can easily picture bisecting an otherwise bare stage. Blyth’s character’s conscience-crisis breakdown, which begins with aggressive flirtation with the boss’s wife, moves to chugging the champagne put on ice for a family dinner deferred again and again by narrative complications, then going walkabout in the desert, feels like the breakdown of Huppert’s son in White Material, but charted on the page rather than truly erratic, and all this signifies simply a frustrating and counterintuitive choice of source material for a filmmaker such as Denis, whose cinema is so elliptical, so mysteriously true to the lived sensual experience of confusing power dynamics. Her greatest and most beguiling films can sound, on the page, bald-faced and almost insultingly banal; the challenge when writing about, say, Beau Travail is to convey how a simple thesis, about how masculinity and empire sublimate taboo desire into rituals of domination, can feel so quicksilver, heedless and immersive onscreen.
Denis, here working with new regular DP Éric Gautier, has handled the digital transition as well as any filmmaker. 2022’s Stars at Noon, which Gautier also shot, had a bleached, harsh daylight look to it; this is the nocturnal companion piece, which brings out the textures of sweaty skin outdoors in the cooling night and prickly pallid skin indoors in the air conditioning, in a complex of shipping-containing housing humming with artificial light and the hum of generators. The sight lines always keep you off-balance, drawing you into a bleary and reactive tactility, pocked by the almost-too-intimate textures of red dirt sloughing off a bare leg in a weak shower. McKenna-Bruce, who deplanes at a dusty airstrip in spike heels carrying a makeup case emblazoned with the word “Babe” is best-in-cast, fragile and jet-lagged and never comfortable in one mood for long in a role similar to that of Vincent Gallo’s tender spurned bride in Trouble Every Day. She wanders around the last third of the film in a red slip that clings to her obscenely, moving as if she can feel the entire continent touching her skin.