The Fence (Claire Denis, 2025).
A stoic figure, half covered in shadows, half in the glare of a construction site’s security lights, demands the release of his brother’s corpse. The man speaks firmly but also lapses into silence. Played by Isaach de Bankolé, whose face can speak without words, he maintains the calm of a statue yet radiates an ancient physical need: the reclamation of a body. This insistence on the acknowledgment of a death—and, by implication, on culpability—is stymied and deflected by Horn (Matt Dillon), the American running the nondescript worksite located with equal vagueness somewhere in western Africa. Claire Denis’s The Fence is the first film since 2009 the white French director has made on the continent of her birth.
The title refers to the barrier dividing Alboury (de Bankolé) and Horn, demarcating the spartan industrial site—a soulless affair of metal cargo crates, looming oil drums, and bare accommodations—from its arid surroundings, punctuated by watchtowers. The compound, which will soon be transferred to Chinese owners, has the air of impending evacuation when two outsiders arrive. The first is Alboury, whose brother was recently killed in a workplace accident, the latest casualty of labor exploitation by Western firms. The fact of his death is shocking to no one on the site, and only gathers a sense of gravity when Alboury refuses to be paid off. The other arrival is Horn’s young wife, Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce), a woman whose imposing luggage (which “smells of Europe,” she complains), high heels, and petite, concentrated beauty promise a disruption to the all-male work site. In fact, only the white workers—Horn and his brooding, disgruntled protegee, Cal (Tom Blyth)—are thrown into anticipation and confusion while the Black staff take note of Leonie with dismissive indifference. Inside the fence is a tense triangle of young wife, older husband, and muscled young man; outside the fence, a far more grave geometry between Horn’s terse negotiations, the unseen body of a dead man, and Alboury’s grand moral obstinance.
Adapted from the from Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1979 play, Black Battles with Dogs, The Fence is not only a dance between characters on either side of the frankly symbolic barrier, but also a dance between cinematic expression and the simplicity and artifice of its theatrical source. Horn paces back and forth in front of Alboury, stiffly trading “sirs” and repeatedly declaiming on his exasperation. Likewise evoking the stage is de Bankolé’s implacable demeanor in the nearly black-box atmosphere of the nighttime construction site. In contrast to this histrionic tête-à-tête, the younger Cal and Leonie are psychologically and sensually alive, flummoxed by their own presence in Africa and their role in colonial exploitation and violence.
The excellent McKenna-Bruce takes quickly to Denis’s established idiom of strong-willed and elusive characters whose expressive physicality offers tantalizing glimpses of interiority. When Leonie removes her wildly inappropriate shoes, she evokes the iconic ending of Josef von Sternberg’s pre-Code colonial fantasy Morocco (1930), when Marlene Dietrich decides to leave her previous life behind and walks into the desert barefoot. Ruggedly beautiful Dillon recalls certain Hollywood westerns as Horn holds forth in front of his compound, carved from the land of others. And in Blyth’s angry, anguished, and horny Cal, contesting the masculinity of the aging patriarch, there are flashes of red-blooded Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner.
Denis’s last movie set in Africa, White Material (2009)—in which de Bankolé plays a legendary rebel leader—was shot in Cameroon but set in an unnamed country; The Fence was shot in Senegal but similarly intentionally strips the setting and imagery down to the point of partial abstraction. The location is “a lot nicer by daylight,” Horn apologizes to his wife, but even the few daytime scenes suggest an ephemeral bivouac. White Material, set on a coffee plantation with the country on the edge of civil war, had a social, geographic, and psychic expansiveness where The Fence more closely resembles the nightmarish confined atmosphere of Denis’s underappreciated 2013 chamber piece, Bastards. Adapted by the filmmaker, her recent English-language screenwriter, Andrew Litvack (High Life, 2018; Stars at Noon, 2022), and Suzanne Lindon (Spring Blossom, 2020), the film leans into the allegorical weight of the play. It takes little interest in any specific aspects of today’s economic colonialism, the lives of the Westerners working on such sites, or those of the locals working there or living nearby. The conflict and the drama are therefore presented as older, deeper, and mythic. Reduction, rather than expansion, gets closer to the violence at the story’s core, though this frequently risks creaky generalizations and forgoes the sting of specificity. But the director is no stranger to evoking a lot from a little, from taking a gesture, a face, or an image and granting it remarkable and unexpected powers. The pieces are simple, and the playing field is spare, though something of the filmmaker’s poetry is lost amid forced flourishes of acting and some charged but ungainly melodrama. But by the film’s tragic ending, the symbolism and theatricality falls away in the face of material fact: It all comes down to blood and bodies.
The Fence (Claire Denis, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: When I saw the spare compound that is the setting for The Fence, the first thing I thought was that the film would be some kind of colonial western. How were you thinking about the film’s genre?
CLAIRE DENIS: Things turn slowly more abstract. At the origin, it’s a play. A play I saw in the theater a long time ago, because the man who wrote it, Bernard-Marie Koltès, was a friend of mine and [of] Isaach de Bankolé. I wanted to start adapting the play into a film because… it’s a long story. Bernard was sick with AIDS. I knew he was sick, but in those times, nobody spoke so much about the disease. He died in 1989, but before he died, he had dreamed we were working on a project together. We were working on a script together, but he felt so weak, so he told me, Adapt a play, it’s easier. It’s hard to remember how difficult it was to see people dying so fast. So I said yes. I was honest, but I was not. I was in an emotional state. And then every day he kind of thought that I was already shooting the play. When he died, he said, Anyway, the film is made—something like that. I always felt… not guilty, and of course, I have a million reasons not to feel obliged to make this film, but in a way, there was a link I could not cut, you know? For me and for Isaach, too. It took me years, and suddenly I told Isaach, I’ll try. But by the time I wanted to go, Nigeria was impossible to shoot for many reasons. I had to go to Senegal. But the extreme difference was the fact that Senegal, it’s a salient country, very dry, and everything was written for the red mud and the rain and trees of the equatorial part of Africa, things growing like crazy. So I had to change my vision of the set, because I thought that the fence among the trees and the mud would have been less obvious.
NOTEBOOK: Does such a change of location, of vision, frustrate or inspire you?
DENIS: I had to do it, and I could not imagine myself telling Isaach: “We cannot shoot in Kinshasa, Cameroon, or in Nigeria, and so I dropped the idea.” For me, it was an obligation. I loved the people working with us in Senegal. There was no problem with postponing or not doing. But it changed something in my vision of this sort of jail. For the first time, with this film, I was able to build the location. There was nothing. We took old containers, and we assembled the containers to build a house, and even built the watchtowers. Next to the set there were three real construction sites, and when we finished shooting they bought some of our containers and our watchtowers. I couldn’t believe they wanted to buy our watchtowers!
NOTEBOOK: You place a lot of emphasis on the screenwriters you work with, like Jean-Pol Fargeau and Christine Angot. I was surprised to see Vincent Lindon’s daughter, Suzanne Lindon, who made a very beautiful movie five years ago, cowrote The Fence.
DENIS: I knew Suzanne as a little girl. I knew her mother, I know her father. I loved her film. One day we met by chance, and she said, Please, can I work with you on this next project? I said, You’re too young to play Leone, but if you want to collaborate with me and Andrew Litvack, who was the English-speaking person, it would be great. The English language was also something important in Nigeria—people are speaking with white people. They can speak English, like in West Cameroon, because of the colonization. But one of the original languages in the film is Yoruba, the original language of Isaach de Bankolé. Even though we moved the film from Nigeria up to Senegal, where nobody really speaks Yoruba, I kept this language for Isaach.
NOTEBOOK: You’ve been working with Isaach for over 40 years now. How has your relationship changed with time?
DENIS: We have changed a lot: our bodies, our faces—maybe not his, but me. I feel how I have become slightly weaker. Our friendship, our trust in each other, is the same. To trust each other, and the respect we have for each other, this is something that never changes. It’s different from family, because with family there is love and respect, but sometimes not trust.
Bastards (Claire Denis, 2013).
NOTEBOOK: There’s something about your films in the power of clothing. I still picture Vincent Lindon’s loose white dress shirt from Bastards and Isabelle Huppert’s thin dress in White Material. This film has a surprising costume change into tuxedoes at the construction site.
DENIS: In the play, they also had tuxedoes ready for the evening with fireworks, so I kept the idea. In Chocolat [1988], there’s an English man visiting [the family], and it’s shocking because he wears a tuxedo for the dinner. The English people were so precise with the elegance of moments. I remember my father wearing shorts and casual shirts; and next to the border with Nigeria, people were wearing fancy clothes for dinner. I thought it was a part of this idea of not living in a place, of keeping to their own. Clothes do so much to a character.
NOTEBOOK: You link this film quite directly with White Material by using one of the Tindersticks’ music cues from that film.
DENIS: I used that music from White Material at the end credits. This piece of music broke my heart at that time, it was the music that he [Tindersticks lead singer Stuart A. Staples] made for the little soldier, and I asked him permission to use it in The Fence. I said, “Please, if you allow me to use it, I will be happy—once was not enough.” And then he made a second piece of music for the film afterwards. It was hard to use more music in this film. When I was writing the script, I knew that I wanted Cal to sing Midnight Oil’s “Beds are Burning,” and if he was in his room, a Kylie Minogue song. Tom really liked it, so we kept the two Australian musicians.
White Material (Claire Denis, 2009).
NOTEBOOK: You’re now collaborating with Hollywood stars with such faces: Robert Pattinson, Margaret Qualley, and now Matt Dillon, whose face is incredible on the big screen.
DENIS: I met Matt Dillon a long time ago, because he’s a friend of Isaach’s. One year, I was on the jury in Venice, and he was too, and we got along well. He asked me, Why don’t you ask me to work with you? Time passed, and I was walking in the street in Paris. The script to The Fence was not finished yet. I was in the middle of the problem of Which country are we going to shoot in? Suddenly someone waved at me, and it was Matt! He was in Paris for a gallery show of his paintings, and he said that we should try to work together. I gave him the script, which wasn’t yet complete, and he said yes! Matt Dillon, for me, was never a Hollywood actor. He is, number one, one of the most beautiful men on earth. And he is curious about so many things: about life, about people. It made things very easy for me, working with him.
NOTEBOOK: He made me think about old westerns. With that face, with that brow, I was thinking of these aging Hollywood stars in the 1950s and ’60s. He reminded a friend of Clark Gable in The Misfits [1961], which also has this configuration of a young man and a young woman, presided over by an aging male who’s very masculine but getting older and starting to face the fact his time has peaked. One of the things I found fascinating about the movie was that the actors all acted differently. Isaach performs in a certain way, Matt in another, and the younger actors are each working in their own registers. Matt’s performance was the most dramatic, the most symbolic.
DENIS: Yes, exactly! Isaach was a judge behind the barrier. Only when he’s recovering the body, he becomes the brother, crying. And the nightmare with Cal’s dog at the beginning of the movie was not in the play. It was in Bernard’s personal notes on the play. He wrote: If this character had a nightmare, it would be that.
NOTEBOOK: There was a line from that scene that I was very struck by: “A white man’s fantasy of Black man’s nightmare.” Is that how you see the film as well?
DENIS: No. Of course, the story is me and Bernard—we are white. I tried when shooting to make many shots of Albury’s point of view. It’s not like that in the play. The camera goes to the other side. I didn’t want it to always be from the point of view of the white people inside their fence. I wanted Albury to look at them.
NOTEBOOK: Since you mentioned the opening dream, I wanted to ask you about dog, which I don’t think I can get out of my head, this dog running at the camera in slow motion. How did you make this?
DENIS: I worked with a special-effects team, and I told them that this very little dog is becoming a monster. We took the dog you see in the film, and that dog is slowly transformed by special effects. I’m afraid of dogs.
Jacques Rivette: The Night Watchman (Claire Denis and Serge Daney, 1990).
NOTEBOOK: Whenever I see your films, I have the movies of Jacques Rivette in the back of my head because of your documentary Jacques Rivette: The Night Watchman [1990]. He was an active theatergoer, and I know how much theater meant to him and his practice. His films are very infused by theater and deconstruct the lines between it and cinema. Does theater mean a lot to you?
DENIS: My relation with Bernard’s plays was very different. Jacques Rivette had a strong relation with French classic theater. Bernard was my age, and he was experiencing the world as a tragedy, traveling as a way to discover how tragic it could be. But in Rivette’s films, like L’amour fou [1969], the theater is like the monument in the middle of the film. It’s something solid. It’s classic. It says “the tragedy of love,” or “jealousy.” For Rivette, film is a modern way to catch something from the theater. I was trying to tell the story Bernard told. I was not trying to make a theatrical effect; I was trying to be honest with the play, with the characters, that’s all.
NOTEBOOK: Do you have a favorite moment in the film?
DENIS: Moments with Tom and Mia. There are also moments I like between Isaach and Matt when they repeat themselves. I remember things from my own childhood when this extra polite way of speaking was typically the thing I hated most. It was the thing that expressed that you are Black and white, and that’s it. It’s the fence, the language.
Stars at Noon (Claire Denis, 2022).
NOTEBOOK: You’re such an intrepid filmmaker…
DENIS: I don’t feel like an intrepid person. [Laughs.]
NOTEBOOK: I feel a sense of adventure and creation on the set. And you like to travel to make many of your movies. Before this shoot, you were in Central America making Stars at Noon [2022].
DENIS: If I could make a small connection with Koltès: I wanted to shoot Stars at Noon in Nicaragua, where the book was set. I was in Managua doing location scouting. All the book was there—the hotel, everything. Denis Johnson had just died, so it was very moving. One day, I visited the Maison des Jeunes et de la Culture on the recommendation of the French ambassador. There, I saw a huge black building in the dark. The center’s director said, “Oh, it’s our theater, but we don’t use it.” I walked around the theater, and on its front was the name of the theater: Bernard-Marie Koltès. It’s strange, huh?