Avis des critiques

In addition to the ever-compelling Bankolé, the acting talent on display in White Material is top tier. Isabelle Huppert is unsurprisingly brilliant, by turns understated and explosive. But the real tour-de-force performance here is delivered by Christopher Lambert... [this] is indisputably one of his subtlest performances.

Denis methodically spins a slow-motion carousel of fragmentation and disorientation.

At its essence, White Material is an exploded chamber drama. A Haneke-style family unit (complete with a brutally bored son) holed up mentally, emotionally, economically and geographically encounters various interlopers while fighting to preserve a bourgeois sense of "integrity."

[White Material] is dreamy and elliptical in its fractured timeline and visual lyricism, yet so searing and bloody that it’s indelible.

Ms. Denis has an extraordinary gift for finding the perfect image that expresses her ideas, the cinematic equivalent of what Flaubert called le mot juste... [This is] true of “White Material,” a striking film filled with images that sometimes reveal their full meaning only when their beauty curdles in the chain of signification.

This is a beautiful, puzzling film. The enigmatic quality of Huppert's performance draws us in. She will never leave, and we think she will probably die, but she seems oblivious to her risk.

White Material does not behave like a “thriller”, nor like the traditional hand-wringing, breast-beating movie about Africa, and yet it as lapel-graspingly urgent as either, a movie that remains in the mind long after it has finished.

Although White Material achieves the director's trademark dreamy, watery fluidity – coaxing even the worst sticklers for narrative clarity to go with the flow and ignore the strict demarcations between past and present, reality and fantasy – its structure is not half as daring as, say, that of L'intrus, where (as Raúl Ruiz would say) the images created the narrative, rather than vice versa... However, like all Denis films, White Material repays repeat viewings, and grows with them.

Though the compressed, hectic time frame and Denis’ customary exposition-by-experience narration underserve key relationships and plot turns, Huppert and give White Material a vivid emotional through-line.

Unsurprisingly devoid of the kind of faux-liberal displacement/wish fulfillment or colonialist superiority that mars so many First World treatments of the subject, Denis’ film views the continent as a kind of drug, intoxicating yet perilous, that never leaves the system.

Yes, it’s capital-R relevant—yet since it’s a Denis film, it’s hardly a conventional “social problem” picture or even a linear narrative. Instead, it’s yet another emotionally complex study in character identification.