Waste of time

Please don't spend money on this.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

In our daily lives, we use the word "identification" for variety of things that concern social and environmental factors. However, we really do not know what the identification means. Identification is a complicated progress that person never has a full control over this psychological situation. In Lacanian terms, identification can be considered as an instance of comprehension (Lacan J., Gallagher C., 2002). Any external factor can captivate the people to make it become their self-component. "White Material" is a must-see example for the identification issues with questioning colonization.Although of her French origin, Maria considers herself as an African person. She has left France and never desires to return. She herself disdains the white French people with saying "These dirty whites... They don't deserve this beautiful land.". It can be obviously seen that she does not perceive herself as a French, while the rebels and the army call her as one such "dirty white" who is responsible for the country's filthiness. Although all threats, Maria does not retreat her actions for the coffee plantation. When she decides to travel for finding new workers, she even does not want to take the rifle with her. She believes that no harm might occur because of her appeal, identifying herself as an African makes her think in that way. As events spread, it is more clear to everyone around Maria that the situation is turning into less secure and more dangerous. It is important to see that what home means and how it feels to belong in a situation where others mark you an outsider. Manuel also suffers from being white. After two African boys mess with him and cut off his hair, he shaves himself and joins the rebels. We can see that, there is an obvious identity confusion for Manuel who lives for many years in this land as a white people. His depression is a sign of vulnerability for his belongings. Joining rebels can be interpreted as his reaction to again himself and his family to unravel confusion about his identity.As we learn that the coffee plantation is established and owned by Maria's father. His wish is maintaining plantation by his family especially by his daughter, Maria. Plantation has been operated with African workers for years and it seems like a colonial symbol throughout the history. Since the first European colonies on African continent, plantations have been a major slavery places for the African black people. They are purchase by the plantation owners and they can be traded or sold as goods (Austin G., 2017). Although plantations are not operated in that way now, they offer still bad facilities for the African people. They are pushed to work in unacceptable conditions in different types of plantations. Because of that, Maria thinks her father as a root for dirtiness of white people and consequently colonization. In this manner, killing her own father reveals her anger and sorrow about the African people who are the slaves of the plantation. Hence, she wants to end this colonization by destroying the foundation of it. Like mentioned earlier, her father can be seen as a foundation. Feeling and identifying herself as an African sets up the idea of releasing her inner-self and showing where she belongs.

Nobody's asking for constant tales of heroism and villainy. No one wants the same, tired narrative frameworks applied to a piece over and over. Nobody wants a film ticking the boxes that make up a form detailing genre demand every time. Alas, Claire Denis' White Material is so lacking in any sort of punch or concrete reason to give a damn about what's happening that by the end, you end up longing for the pre-sound days of handle-bar moustached sporting men tying young women to railway lines minutes before the hero of the hour rides on in and takes care of business. Here is one of those 'clever' films that depicts a Civil War, as well as all the terror and tension that comes with it, but would like you to think that it's actually secondary to all the "nothingness" going on in the foreground. You know the kind of approach I'm talking about, that sort that should one depict such an understated approach to an event in favour of just nothing, it's somehow "smart". The truth arrives much more crudely than we'd have liked, a film devoid of any sort of intelligence nor reason to even exist; a film without any of the threat that comes with good war films, a film without a grain of interest in its depiction of people too entrenched in their processes to act accordingly – a film without a reason to care; a detached film with very little to get excited about.Unfolding in an unspecified Black African country fluent in French, the film covers a woman named Maria (Huppert) desperate to unload a coffee bean harvest in spite of the fact the elements, in the form of machine gun wielding child soldiers, are rapidly seeping their way across the country. The central idea isn't difficult to see, this notion revolving around the short sightedness of Capitalists too imbued in their own methods and getting a product out to think about themselves and those around them. The premise, equally resounding on paper, will see Huppert's character traipse around a desolate, Spaghetti Western-inflected terrain rife with war and suffering attempting to find people qualified to reap her harvest. Later on, she must maintain relationships with her former husband and son as well as care for an opposition soldier she's taken into the farm's care. The reality is, again, a piece as dry as the climate depicted within; a film as plodding in its depiction of plants being picked, grounded and plantation life in general being ploughed on with as anything else you could name. At least those Italian neo-realist films which were born out of the Second World War had an urgency to them, had something striking about them in spite similar grounds upon which to revolve around "nothing".Things start ominously, beginning with the militarian threat in the form of a group of soldiers wading through a series of homes housed now only by the dead within the dark of the night. Things move to the past tense and we witness Maria hide from a truck full of these soldiers as it trundles down the dirt road, wary of the threat but more wary of the threat posed at her coffee beans back home: a fine crop which will be all but ruined because she cannot find the hands to do the required job out of this insurgency. Back at the plantation, frenzied requests from that of Maria's relatives fall on deaf ears. She, in spite of being white, sees herself as indigenous to this Black African nation and doesn't see as to why she should leave.Her son, Manuel (Duvauchelle), makes for the one character who changes the most as the film progresses; leaving his shy, socially distanced existence for sake of shaving his head of hair; grabbing an assault shotgun and going out on the hunt for blacks after they humiliate him out in the fields during this war. Here is a depiction of something; a character study of someone beginning as one thing, having this outside agency in the form of the war come and affect him, before depicting this person going out and getting involved. Did the young man become enveloped by a hatred of Black Africans? Was it the potentially violent encounter that changed him, enrapturing him with a desire to actually taste violence? Is he destined to live out his days as a Neo-Nazi as of now? The film, in fact, gets things so wrong so often that prior to his transformation it will need to induce drama from the meekest of places when it has Manuel naively venture out of the plantation in order to encounter these Blacks, much in the same way an English language 'slasher' film will perpetrate such things for shrill thrills. Where that aggrieves us there, we should not allow an auteur produced French language piece to fool us here? I read that Denis spent some time in Black French Africa during her childhood and people both speak and write of how film making can be a very personalised thing. If such a thing is true, where is the personalised stamp on her piece of work here? Where is the capturing of life in Black Africa from a white person's perspective, and why is it that such a person feels the need to depict life for such a woman in such a place during a time of war? Was there not enough drama in the first place? As far as French dramas go, White Material is a confused and wholly uninvolving effort.

WHITE MATERIAL – CATCH IT ( B- ) White material is complex and gritty no doubt about that. Kudos for choosing an unusual story about a French woman, who refuse to leave Africa during racial disputes. Nonetheless the story is fascinating but the movie is really slow and multifaceted. Somehow the director didn't try to educate the viewers, she just pick up the story and presented in a way that everything we our self have to assume. What if I am a lame person and don't know what happens in Africa time to time?? I think a movie should be a complete package. For example, during the Most Gritty & Important scene, when gangster kids enter Manuel's house and on hearing Manuel (Nicholas Duvauchelle) waking up they run off. Manuel then follows them in the jungle and then Manuel injure his foot and suddenly in a Snap we see African Gansta kids holding Manual's head and snatching his chain, cutting his hairs with machete, after that they leave him entirely naked in the fields. I didn't get the editing in the scene, at one second the kids were far away looking at him turning back home and in the next scene they were holding him down. (WHY we have to suppose they suddenly grape him). After that the drastic behavior of the Manuel is understandable to an extent but there have been many scenes where the Editing has been roughly done like that even in the Last Scene we see Maria (Isabelle Huppert) coming towards her house, then in Next Second she is on top of storage room and sees her Son's body Burned Alive and in next second she is Killing her father-in-law with machete because she believes he is the reason she has spend all her life in Africa (That's what I got from the ending, I really have to search more to get what does that meant). So, the whole movie moves with a very slow pace and then in important scenes it move like Flash speed. That was Annoying!! Isabelle Huppert was excellent though it requires smart thinking to appreciate her performance, because she is not the women we see and meet in our daily life. She is strong, stronger than Men actually. Nicholas Duvauchelle is Amazing; he is a French ALEX PETTYFER, smart, bold, sexy and super talented. Overall, watch it for some really smart moments and Isabelle Huppert & Nicholas Duvauchelle Brilliant performance.

White Material is a film about a coffee plantation in an unnamed African country (shot in Cameroon). Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) runs the place for her father Henri (Michel Subor). She has a layabout son called Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle) and a weak-willed husband André (played by Christopher Lambert of Highlander fame).The French army is withdrawing and the country is fractured into regular army, rebels, and newly-formed mad-dog local militias out for rape and pillage, sprung from the ground once law and order dissolves, like Ray Harryhausen's skeleton warriors of the dragon's teeth (Jason and the Argonauts).It's time to banish the White Material, that is white folk and the trappings of white living. Maria doesn't want to know though and stays on stubbornly trying to process her coffee crop.The film is quite pretty and captures the feel of Africa on the ground, of the isolation and the wild beauty, but also the extreme lurking danger. Denis has roots in Africa and so manages a lot of authenticity. The dialogue is occasionally awesome, soliloquies in which Maria curses whites and talks about Africa in relation to Europe particularly stand out.Unfortunately I think there are weak elements, Lambert isn't good enough and his character isn't even necessary (which goes for Henri too), Maria does something brutal and inexplicable at the end (in true clichéd Huppert style), and the film looks like it took a severe amount of cutting as there are plot threads that are barely picked up. The film has the feel of an overly condensed epic. The biggest problem though maybe the narrative structure, where the end occurs at the beginning, which in all frankness, and with due respect to a director who has entertained me with great films more than once, comes off as amateurish.As usual the Tindersticks provide a wonderful soundtrack for Denis, so important for an auteur to have a proper musical collaborator, but they basically paper over the cracks.The film is good enough if you just look at is as mesmerising anarchy, but it's not a multi-faceted Denis masterpiece. Isaach De Bankolé is underused as Le Boxeur, the rebel hero general, he's a symbol of a strong moral Africa, gut-shot and dying alone. This character lingers in the memory.