In her first film, Chocolat, Claire Denis returned to the French-colonised Africa of her childhood. The setting is Cameroon, one of the countries she lived in during the nomadic years spent following her father, a colonial administrator. The protagonist, France, returns to the country where she was born and, in flashback, the film tells a story of colonial domination in miniature. In a relationship marked by small cruelties on both sides, the servant Protée (Isaach de Bankolé, whose beauty seems to have been sculpted with a knife) is desired by France’s mother: the erotic and the political intertwine. When he refuses her advances, his place in the large white house becomes unsustainable. He’s the man who knew too much.

Many of Claire Denis’s subsequent films looked at the legacy of colonialism from a metropolitan point of view: fetishism, violence, guilt. But twenty-one years later, she returned to Africa to make this film, White Material (the title taken from the local slang meaning “white people’s things”; and, by extension, white people themselves). It’s a very different film. Where in Chocolat she appeared to be painting a portrait (the composition of the frames is measured, the story follows a perfect arc), here her intention is far more urgent. Denis uses her camera like someone documenting, like a war reporter does: light falls on things always expecting the worst. That’s how the film opens, with a searchlight scanning the night. Le Boxeur, leader of the rebels (Isaach de Bankolé again, another mythical figure), is dead (that is, he’s in the second phase of his myth). What has happened? What follows is an extended flashback en abyme, twisted like a nightmare. The whole grammar of the film is used to undermine clarity: cuts obscure jumps forwards and backwards in time. The landscape is a place without name. The camera captures fragments, happenings, body parts (more backs of necks than faces). Yet, bit by bit, a question comes into view: when is the best time to leave a place where we were never welcome to begin with?

The family of the ex-husband of Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert, strong and fragile like a soldier) are long-standing growers of coffee in the region. Coffee (like tea, sugar and tobacco, the fuels of the Empire) was always connected to the history of slavery and colonialism. Yet, once the colonies gained independence, the ongoing presence of white businesses created a challenging equilibrium: on the one hand, they created jobs; on the other, they exploited natural resources and the manual labour of the locals. At the time this story begins, all the signs tell Maria that it’s time for her to leave, but she refuses. A habit has become a sense of entitlement, to the land, to the business, to that life (none of which, in truth, actually belongs to her, but was entrusted to her, has become her mission: a military term). Claire Denis speaks of White Material as the flipside of the stories of Black migrants who have long lived in France and even so are viewed as trespassers. Here, a white family has lived in Africa for a long time: “many of our bones are buried here”. Are they not trespassing even more?

Huppert had earlier proposed to Denis to adapt a book by Doris Lessing about Rhodesia in the 40s, but Denis declined: if she were to film with Huppert in Africa, it would be a “story from today”. Years later, that story took form based on two news items, one about a rebelling African official, and the other about French coffee growers advised by the French army to leave the country. White Material is the setting where these news items meet the reality of Ethiopia, of Nigeria, of a continent that has been at almost continuous civil war for decades; where entire populations have been displaced (by conflict, hunger, lack of water); where bands of rebels fight against governments rotten to the core, but, at the same time, commit all sorts of atrocities; and where child soldiers, through hope or lack thereof, join their ranks (another behavioural pattern that persists) and end up dead at the hands of the army. Brothers kill brothers. Even so, says Denis, it’s easy to look at all of this as “an African problem”, a “tribal issue”, and never stop to think about the political and economic situation that arose in the post-colonial vacuum, that is, in the vacuum left there by us.

Here, the collapse of the family and the end of the plantation reflect the corruption of institutions (military, political, social). What can Maria salvage? As sure as an axe, she cracks only once: when she risks losing the image she holds of herself (and utters something so simple that we know immediately who she really is). Claire Denis talks of this film as Maria’s mental space: we never know what has really happened and what was imagined. Everything is a fever, a hallucination. I would suggest that the film presents itself like a problem (formal, narrative, moral) but it does this through necessity. White Material films, like a problem, that other problem, the civil war. When the film begins, has the rebellion already ended? What difference does it make? The circle closes itself and continues to turn.