| RATING: | 100% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Exemplary euro-centric end-of-empire feature showing a French colony in Africa on the brink of collapse. After years of exploiting Blacks, most Whites realize the game is up and choose to leave rather than be massacred. But one White woman here, superbly-played by Isabelle HUPPERT, decides to cling on in the vain hope of still making a living and a life from her coffee plantation despite the retreat of the French Army back to France.
The real cleverness of this movie is the strange twilight world oppressive people live in: Their Heart of Darkness - imagining that those they exploit could ever be their friends. Like the victim frightened of being shot for not accepting White hegemony, these Whites believe that compliance with their strictures comes consensually, rather than from fear of being shot. Or like the woman who consents to being raped to avoid being hit, this allows the rapist to delude himself that he is doing nothing wrong in the hope that one threat will be enough and future sexual activity will be (pseudo-)consensual.
The “White Material” of the title refers not only to the property of the Whites - expropriated from Blacks generations before - but the Whites themselves. This forms the basis of much of the drama as the issue of which (& who) belongs to whom is at the essence of White supremacism.
The real problem for the Whites here is that their racism leaves them with nothing to bequeath to their children, except a morally-bankrupt culture that leaves their descendents with enhanced psychiatric problems concerning guilt and shame. That the White son here becomes a homicidal maniac is hardly surprising given the phenotypism of his upbringing. And, when push comes to shove, no matter the rights and wrongs of any situation, Whites are always going to be superior, Blacks worthless. They sacrifice their own children upon the altar of their own delusions: A White African born in a country that does not want him.
Shot with an accent on the visual, much happens without explanation and is abstracted from reality; leaving half the work of understanding and enjoying to an audience hungry for something more than spoon-fed stories from insubstantial minds that is Hollywood. The characterization is thin but we are here dealing with archetypes of a certain cast of mind that, like the particular country and the particular time period is never explored - only shown. Africa is presented as non-exotic and as not a sunny place - in more ways than one. Thus we do not get bogged down in stereotypes of Africans. Yet Blacks are still shown as very different from Whites; explaining why Africa became the White man's graveyard - since their could never have been any kind of rapprochement with inherent evil. Almost as if the land itself wanted Whites gone. Only a Black filmmaker could restore the balance only hinted at in this movie by telling the Black side of the story from the essentially first-person narrative brilliantly-presented here, since Whites can only ever tell their own story from their own point-of-view.
As a kind of fleshing-out of the added French scenes in Apocalypse Now Redux, this is particularly striking given that Huppert’s physignomy is similar to the latter film’s Aurore Clément.
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