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Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Powerful

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

The ambiguous objective history evolved into the immediate slaughter, in which witness found no executioners or saviors. The outbreak of the film is focused on a moment, when everything is laid out in a logical. The quest for reason tends to ignore humanity itself. Therefore, the movie portrays the firmness itself in the ambiguous background. It was the unsolved curse between the blood and the earth, and the perfect performance of Isabelle Huppert.

In French colonial Africa, Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) is struggling to finish the coffee bean harvest. The rebels are approaching. French forces are leaving. Local have turned to banditry and her workers have mostly abandoned her. The African mayor bullies André Vial (Christopher Lambert) to get his father to sell the plantation. Maria has their white son Manuel and André has his half-African son Jose. Maria stubbornly refuses to leave the harvest even after Manuel is stripped naked by a couple of boys. Manuel starts to deteriorate mentally. Maria discovers wounded rebel fighter Le Boxeur in her barn.Isabelle Huppert embodies a fierce interior and stubbornness. The family's varying reaction to their situation can be mind-boggling. There is real tension but also frustration with Maria. These are maddening characters in a maddening world.

Isabelle Huppert plays Maria Vial, a white farmer living in an unnamed African country. With her ex husband, father and son, she leads a cloistered, privileged existence, overseeing her coffee plantations while talk of civil war warbles on the radios. As conflicts escalate, Maria's plantation workers abandon her, some fearing for their lives, others deciding to at last cast off the shackles of Colonialism. As African leaders and mobs converge on her plantation, Maria remains fixed, refusing to abandon the continent. To reveal more about the plot would be to dilute the horrors that unfold.Though director Claire Denis made better films with "35 Shots of Rum" and "The Intruder", "White Material" does well to balance the lingering afflictions of colonialism and French occupation with Africa's own betrayals of its independence. Nevertheless, the film suffers from a conventional, obvious narrative, the result of Denis' struggles to condense "Big Themes" down into some manageable, approachable structure. Like most of these films, "White Material" also treats Africa and Africans in a somewhat condescending manner.Incidentally, this current wave of French and African (though often also French co-financed) pro-Africana films ("Bamako", "White Material", "Munyurangabo" etc) echoes a similar wave during the early sixties. After and while the British Empire was being disbanded, British and Italian directors released numerous "anti-Empire", "anti-Colonial" films, one, "Guns at Batasi", strongly resembling Denis' work here.8/10 - Ranges from powerful to far too conventional. See "Le Grand Blanc De Lambarene". Worth one viewing.

White Material promotes the idea of Africa as 'heart of darkness'. Having the action take place in an 'unnamed African country' has the effect of making the entire continent a locus for every kind of depravity and evil, because this could be 'anywhere and everywhere' on the continent. Giving no historical, social or political context for the events which unfold situates them outside of any framework and has the effect of portraying Africans as irrational: a racist discourse which has been sustained since the eighteenth century and on, when justifications had to be found firstly for slavery and then later on for colonial exploitation. I hope I ve read this film wrong because I enjoyed Denis' other film 35 Shots of Rum and, although I ve not seen it, I heard her film Chocolat is empathetic towards Africans.