A familiar map on foreign territory in Claire Denis’ The Fence.
“Step into the light.” Such an appeal evolves from polite urging to desperate exhortation in the broad, oblique expanse of Claire Denis’ The Fence, recently screened at the 63rd annual New York Film Festival. This expanse, however, is belied by the film’s confined setting – the grounds of a construction site helmed by an unnamed British multinational corporation in a similarly unspecified West African country. It proves fertile ground for the kind of gestural ambiguity that remains a hallmark of the French director, where the linearity of Apollonian Western sensibilities collides with the unyielding rust of African soil. For those acquainted with Denis’ filmography, this sounds like familiar territory, both geographically and thematically – and it is. But where White Material digests a marred colonial heritage with incisive tonal lucidity, The Fence takes a more conceptual tack in its illustration of contemporary colonialism and its attendant despair.
The film is adapted from the late Bernard Marie-Koltes’ (A resonant name in French theater before his death from AIDS in 1989) 1979 play Black Battles with Dogs. Matt Dillon cuts a distinctly American-abroad figure (rough edges, hard drinking) as the foreman Horn, charged with navigating the final days of the British-led project before handing the reins to the Chinese. It proves no easy task. His erratic and impetuous colleague Cal (Tom Blyth) has invited the unwelcome ire of the local village with an act of arbitrary, spasmodic violence. Horn’s newlywed Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce) is thrown into the mix for good measure, the soft-featured ingenue making her first visit to the continent in the hopes of joining her husband for an extended stay.
The Fence opens with an understanding that the site is under a siege of sorts. A spectral, imposing presence lingers just outside the fence of the construction site – Alboury (Isaach de Bankole), a local villager, comes to collect his brother’s remains. His subdued indignation resounds across the barrier, rattling Horn and driving the film into a staid, inscrutable madness; a mythic atmosphere that the white characters inhabit as if intoxicated by some elixir of the night. The film unfolds over the course of one evening, and this condensed time frame augments the claustrophobia of the physical premise – the rational logic of industrial material wending its geometric way across the landscape with carceral force and insulation.
If there is any space to roam within the film, it is that of conceptual and thematic territory. Eric Gautier’s cinematography hews close to the construction site’s boundaries, foregrounding both the physical and the photonic. Steel and plastic reflect a pallid sterility subordinated to the visceral red of the iron soil. Shadow and darkness provide solace and clarity; light evokes something banal and overexposed. These threads of transvaluation course through the film with thrusts of movement and volatility, alongside a visual palette that’s steadied by the confidence of Denis’ auterism. Notably, its conceptual heft is contingent upon a passing digression in the first act – the construction site’s operations are soon passing into the hands of the Chinese, an explicit nod to the shifting poles of power in contemporary geopolitics and its evolving colonial lineage. As The Fence progresses, it becomes difficult to view any of the film’s action as independent from that conceit. The conflict depicted is racial, national, socioeconomic, and internecine. The totalizing anguish of the colonialist is both part and parcel of the mechanism by which it administers power, inescapable and self-punishing. We are witnessing the death throes of Western hegemony over the colonial project, a violent culmination redounding upon itself. These ideas loom large across the players on the stage, so much so that the film at times veers off into the allegorical. Denis’s typically spare structure and enigmatic rhythms leave perhaps too much of an opening for ideas of this weight to assert themselves, but the result remains one of emotional dissonance and moral contemplation.
