Saturday, September 17, 2011
HARVEST TIME
Today's film was Claire Denis'
The French are leaving the unnamed African country. There are rebels and an unstable government. There are, suddenly, child soldiers. Chaos. Total.
A three generation French/African family with a coffee plantation copes.
Isabelle Huppert, again, turns in a tour de force performance as the wife, daughter and mother who is trying to hold it all together. Mostly to stay until things settle down.
She is all but estranged from her husband, her young adult son, blond and blue eyed African has gone native. The old man is dying. What else? A hell of a lot.
She is the center of the storm. Trying to batten down the hatches.
She has a lover who is a leader of the rebels who has lost control and is hiding on the plantation. What else can get fucked up?
Just about everything as it turns out.
Now. What about the film. It is dreamy. A nightmare in color. Time sequence is stirred up. Watch her dresses. She wanders in and out of the small town trying to fix stuff. It is a losing proposition.
It is odd that something so dreamy and out of sequence can make so much sense and, in the end, be a picture of Africa, the colonial past, the reality of the multi racial present and a picture of what is to come.
The child soldiers, boys and girls, are terrifying. Even I wanted to run and I am sitting in Palm Springs in front of an iMac.
All around is the land's beauty and people are running amok.
I could not watch this again but it is a 4 out of Netflix5 in quality. All handheld and right in the middle of things, it involves and engages right down to the last bullet fired in drug addled hysteria by the kids stirred up by a crazy DJ who has taken over the airwaves.
Oh. What is "white material"? A catch phrase for the white's stuff and the white themselves. They are objects. Huppert slowly gets this until she, herself is crazed.
See? I can't end this.
Yes. A 4 out of Netflix5. It is done. I am done.
Labels: films
