Still from The Fence.
Somewhere in West Africa, armed men keep careful watch over a construction site and remote compound where white expats live. The guards, all of them Black, are stationed at posts that tower over the area, a position from which they become omniscient observers. They communicate through melodic calls. If you’re not paying attention, it can be easy to miss how these uniformed agents function as a kind of chorus in Claire Denis’s haunting new neocolonial drama, The Fence.
Based on Bernard-Marie Koltès’s allegorical play Black Battle With Dogs, The Fence follows a tense evening between Alboury, a West African man searching for the body of his recently deceased brother Nouofia, and Horn, the white manager of the construction site. Nouofia worked for Horn, and Alboury knows that his brother’s body is somewhere on the grounds. The encounter between the two men stretches from late evening into the next morning, revealing the racist impulses that define relationships between white settlers and Black natives on the continent. Against the backdrop of this confrontation, Horn worries about his deputy, Cal, an impulsive engineer with a short fuse, and the arrival of his wife, Leonie, an English nurse.
The Fence is, comparatively, a minor Denis film. It builds on the themes introduced in her 1988 feature Chocolat and revisited in her 2009 war drama White Material, from the colonizer’s fascination with and feelings of repulsion for “the Other” to racialized psychosexual dynamics. And it also showcases her mastery of atmosphere and her keen interest in the human body. Working with the French cinematographer Éric Gautier, Denis fills The Fence with arousing close-ups of bare chests, clenched hands, and wet eyes. But perhaps the most compelling thing about The Fence is how it applies Denis’s ongoing intellectual curiosities to a project more expressly focused on performance. The film’s particularly striking turns from the English actor Tom Blyth and the Ivorian actor Isaach de Bankolé, Denis’s longtime collaborator, reveal how the director is trying to incorporate the rhetorical drama of the stage into her sensuous cinematic universe.
In an interview with the American film magazine Reverse Shot, Denis explained that the part of Alboury had expressly been written with Bankolé in mind. “It was Bernard who first introduced me to Isaach,” she said of her relationship with the playwright, who died as a result of complications from AIDS at the age of 41. The play, staged a decade before Koltès died in 1989, was inspired by his experiences in Nigeria.
During a trip to Lagos in 1978, Koltès witnessed a workman die at a construction site, an event that drew little concern from the foremen, which forced him to confront the casual racism and violence that Europeans directed toward Africans. “I looked at the black people. I was ashamed of my people; but there was such a hatred gleaming in their eyes that I got scared, and I run back toward the white folks,” he recalled in an interview that was republished in a collection of his works edited by Amin Erfani. With this sentiment, Koltès seemed to echo Aimée Dalens, one of the characters in Denis’s Chocolat, who struggles to navigate the tension of wanting to cross the color line and being too afraid to do so. But unlike Aimée, Koltès became radicalized by his experience, and his play Black Battle With Dogs testifies to this transformation.
Denis alters Koltès’s original text by updating the allegorical story for the present day, translating the dialogue into English and clarifying Alboury’s and the watchmen’s perspectives. When we first meet the mysterious Alboury, played with gripping assurance by Bankolé, he is standing just outside the fence, looking official in his button-down shirt and suspenders. His suit jacket is slung across his shoulder, and he announces himself and his intentions with a firm confidence: “I’m here for my brother’s body,” he tells Horn (Matt Dillon), the foreman standing on the other side.
The exchange between the two begins on a relatively pleasant note, with Horn complimenting Alboury for his impressive language skills and wondering if he is a police officer or a government official. The backhanded praise doesn’t work on Alboury, who remains unyielding to Horn’s invitation to drink whiskey together. He tells Horn that the guards will be suspicious of him if he crosses to the other side and then adds: “The guards know that we cannot let the mother wail all night and all day tomorrow. They know why I came.”
In these early moments, The Fence retains some of its theatrical roots. Denis stages the encounter between Alboury and Horn like a claustrophobic drama, keeping the camera trained on each man’s facial expressions. Alboury emerges as the most interesting character, thanks in large part to Bankolé’s measured portrayal. In Chocolat, the Ivorian actor played Protée, a houseboy who rarely spoke; his performance relied on an understated physicality and Bankolé’s deft facial expressions. If The Fence can be read as a kind of coda to Denis and Bankolé’s first collaboration, then one finds in the actor an older, more assertive version of the colonial servant. Bankolé slips into this character, whose requests for Nouofia’s body function as both the plea of a grieving man and an ultimatum from a defiant subject.
Elsewhere, and earlier in the day, Cal (played by Blyth) has been tasked with picking up Horn’s wife Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce). The young nurse has just arrived in West Africa from London wearing a pair of stiletto shoes. Her inappropriate outfit coupled with her obvious naïveté fascinates Cal, who finds himself increasingly attracted to her. Leonie, on the other hand, is repulsed by the brusque engineer. Their relationship is a strained affair that splinters under the weight of Cal’s obvious feelings of sexual entitlement and Leonie’s minor awakenings.
When the pair arrive at the compound, the chamber drama becomes a volatile psychological spectacle. The guards are as much a witness to these events as Alboury, who observes the white characters drive each other into a maddening, desperate emotional morass. It all begins with Cal, who gets progressively drunker to drown his nightmare flashbacks of murdering Nouofia. His spiral is a frightening descent that Blyth portrays with mesmerizing commitment.
Cal represents the archetypal colonizer: His rage is activated by Nouofia’s perceived disrespect, and later, when he sees Horn negotiating with Alboury, he worries that the foreman will sell him out. Even the idea of his boss listening to a Black man upsets him. His attraction to Leonie becomes another psychic obstacle that he can’t quite overcome: He’s at once desperate for her approval and skeptical of her attraction to Horn, who was once under Leonie’s care after suffering a traumatic accident that left him castrated. Blyth’s portrayal conveys the character’s underlying despair, which the actor showcases in Cal’s slouched shoulders and menacing eyes. His outbursts are both an embarrassment and a liability.
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Horn, for his part, reflects an older colonial order. Like Isabelle Huppert’s Maria in White Material, he has weathered a period of civil unrest; he decides to stay and protect the construction site, making sure that nothing happens to the equipment. Horn, unlike Cal, also believes in the mission of their infrastructure project, and his negotiations with Alboury reveal the foreman’s expectations for a specific kind of subject/settler deference. When Alboury refuses the increasing sums of money that Horn tries to bribe him with, the white foreman offers a word of warning: “When the Chinese take over, you won’t be negotiating in dollars,” he says, as if the devil the Africans know is better than the one they don’t. One wishes that Dillon’s performance—which reflects The Fence’s roots as a play—was a bit looser and less firmly wedded to the exaggerated rhythms of stage productions. His portrayal never quite achieves the balance of Blyth’s or Bankolé’s.
Perhaps the most Denisian character of this bunch is Leonie, a white woman with a desire to cross the invisible threshold and connect with the colonized. From the moment she gets off the plane, Leonie is filled with wonder at the terra-cotta sand, the roaming animals, and the expansive landscape. She finds the people fascinating as well, taking care to greet the cooks in the construction pit’s kitchen and, later, trying to engage them in meaningful conversation.
While Denis tones down the obvious sexual attraction that Leonie feels for Alboury, McKenna-Bruce’s performance clues us in to the character’s deep fascination. Leonie seeks understanding even though she’s also afraid, representing the kind of colonial shame that Koltès felt after his trip to Lagos. But she has little agency and spends most of the film haunting the compound like a ghost in a red slip dress.
The drama among this quartet simmers for a while before it boils over, leading to major betrayals and breakdowns. In an era of brash political films, from the nervy dynamics of One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s study of underground radicals, to the overwrought thrills of A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow’s depiction of a globe-shifting nuclear threat, The Fence offers a welcome stillness. It possesses the same meditative quality as Pedro Pinho’s I Only Rest in the Storm, an intimate reflection on a Spanish environmental engineer who travels to West Africa to work on an infrastructure project. But whereas Pinho’s film feels intentional in its languor, The Fence ultimately comes off as a meandering examination of a familiar colonial order instead of a charged allegory of its inevitable self-destruction.
Lovia GyarkyeLovia Gyarkye is an editor at Hammer & Hope.