Alien Greed: Corrupt Power Has Nowhere to Hide in Claire Denis’s Strange, Skeletal The Fence

There is no doubt that there is a strong theatrical feel to The Fence (Le Cri des Gardes), the latest feature from French director Claire Denis, which screened in competition at the 73rd San Sebastian Festival. The film was not as well received as some of her previous acclaimed work on similar themes, such as 2009’s White Material), and its detractors have said that, in the chamber piece’s staginess, Denis has not overcome its origins in a 1979 play, Black Battles With Dogs, by Bernard Marie-Koltes, to adapt it effectively for the screen. But for advocates (myself included) of this sharp-edged and strange cinematic investigation of humanity and power, the spatially confined and stripped-back nature of the set-up keeps our attention concentrated on its prickly encounters, as it combusts along an uneasy border between alienation and confrontation, fuelled by inequalities of gender, race, colonialism and capitalism.

Inside the gated and guarded living quarters for the white men spearheading a construction project in an unnamed West African nation, the large crates that function as their rooms have an almost sci-fi quality in their reductive functionality, outside the more ornate trappings of urban civilisation, structured family and community. This is a temporary live-to-work solution, so when site manager Horn (Matt Dillon) brings in his new wife Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce) to reside there, the question of how she can achieve fulfilment here, or even adhere to a traditional domestic role, is glaring.

There is a charged, sinister air of threat hanging over every scene, in an environment where the management class are only here to make money, and the lack of oversight on the power they have accrued through white privilege has enabled their worst instincts to run amok. From the moment Leonie is picked up from the airport by engineer Cal (Tom Blyth), with his reckless driving and lecherous verbal liberties, we suspect this will all end badly — but precisely how, and for whom, is yet to become clear, and drives the suspense. She is thrown like a lit match into the compound dynamic, which is already in a crisis, because a local worker has been killed that day on the job, in what has been covered up as a “work accident,” and his brother Alboury (Isaach de Bankole), a black man in an impeccably tailored suit that suggests access to other avenues of influence, has arrived to demand the body back. He stands outside the fence, refusing to leave until he gets what he has come for, despite Horn’s irritated negotiations and threats. His unwavering insistence is a counterpoint to the devious machinations of an imported, corrupt mercantile system that is transactional, self-serving and as slippery as it is untethered to ethical convictions.

In her impossibly impractical heels and fire-red negligee dress, seductively potent but perilously vulnerable in this ultra-masculine zone of unchecked greed, where we can assume women’s bodies are designated as accessible and disposable for use as those of the local workers have been, Leonie cuts an almost Lynchian, dreamlike figure standing in the desert-like isolation at night. She is positioned by Denis as a sexual archetype, but simultaneously, has enough resourceful chutzpah to present a real upset to the existent power matrix, beyond the homoerotic undercurrent between Horn and Cal, and despite her invitation stemming from an insurance pay-out, as an extension of Horn’s material clout. As these figures bounce off and antagonise each other with their suspicions, skepticism, and willingness to cross all boundaries of legitimised behaviour and laws, a kind of dark, operatic dance of predator and collateral damage shifts and flexes, with glimmers of empathetic connection offering just a haunting reminder of the lost potentiality of another kind of world.

By Carmen Gray
Edited by Birgit Beumers
Copyright FIPRESCI