TIFF ’25: The Fence

***/****
starring Isaach De Bankolé, Matt Dillon, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Tom Blyth
screenplay by Claire Denis, Suzanne Lindon, and Andrew Litvack, based on Black Battles with Dogs by Bernard-Marie Koltès
directed by Claire Denis

By Angelo Muredda A sparsely populated construction site in West Africa becomes the locus of a nocturnal power struggle between Black labourers, white occupiers, and the land that rejects the latter like a virus in Claire Denis’s The Fence, an eerie postcolonial thriller where the subaltern not only speaks but compels, standing at the gate of the white occupiers’ ill-acquired homes and enterprises. Adapted from French writer Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1979 play Black Battles with Dogs, the film comfortably slots into Denis’s oeuvre alongside her earlier works examining the uneasy presence of white settlers in Africa, even as its commitment to the symbolically freighted, dialogue-heavy text makes it, to its detriment, talkier than her usual work. Although it often threatens to devolve into a stilted filmed play, The Fence thrums along to its own strange rhythm on the strength of its magnetic cast, a quartet of polarized opposites bumping into one another in close-quarters, and Denis’s sensitivity to the particular sensory experiences of her characters, each feeling acutely out of place in an uncanny space that one longtime settler assures a new arrival is “very real.”

The title refers to the barrier outside the currently British-owned and soon-to-be Chinese-acquired site’s lodgings, where Alboury (Isaach De Bankolé), a local villager, has come to stand late in the night, demanding to collect the body of his brother, who reportedly died in a workplace accident earlier that day. Alboury’s request is rudely deferred until morning by supervisor Horn (Matt Dillon), who’s annoyed that the visitor’s demands are getting in the way of the impending arrival of his much younger, high-strung wife, Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce), a nurse who cared for him as a patient after a traumatic accident and who’s now hoping to make a home for herself in Horn’s inhospitable metal box in the desert. Hovering at the margins of this drama is Cal (Tom Blyth), a twitchy young worker with a gun who seems to hold the secret of what happened to Alboury’s brother, and who develops a passive-aggressive sexual fixation on Leonie as he looks for a way out of a crisis that Alboury’s arrival intensifies.

The arrival of two new guests to the property starts a countdown clock for a slow-burning apocalypse despite nothing appearing obviously out of order; Denis sets the off-kilter tone with an uncanny, if a bit symbolically oversaturated, slow-motion dream sequence where a dog (likely Cal’s) leaps out of the darkness to attack Alboury and his brother. Let onto the property by the singing night watchmen with whom he shares a language not spoken by the white workers, Alboury is at once a perfectly normal man, plainly asserting his right to what he’s owed, and a seemingly divine manifestation of a strong indigenous claim to the land the others are merely visiting, their presence and their labour enacting varying degrees of violence. His unceasing presence in the light, where Horn keeps insisting he can barely see him, serves as a reminder that whether they’ve worked here for years or just arrived tonight, they are interlopers.

Alboury’s casually assertive tone knocks the literally and figuratively castrated Horn out of balance. He seems altered from moment to moment, earnestly shy around Leonie, then spouting frosty administrative edicts that sound like discarded lines from Catch-22 (“Workers die on construction sites; working has a price”) and crude racial stereotypes (“You Africans have such a great gift for language”) to Alboury. Leonie, meanly nicknamed “Babe” by Cal once he sees her cigarette case with that word on it, is a similarly disruptive force on the all-male site. White women and self-possessed African men who make requests both create an existential crisis for the white men on the site who are used to resolving their inferiority complexes by throwing their weight around and acting with impunity. (The Black workers, meanwhile, are given less interiority but express a tacit approval of Albourie’s cryptic presence while steering clear of Leonie altogether, even as she takes pains to get to know them.)

Schematic as this largely outdoor chamber drama might sound in the abstract, Denis cuts between four perspectives with her usual lyrical, associative style, subtly delineating each protagonist’s affective state through images rather than words–her camera following their yearning glances upon each other’s bodies and watching rugged hands at work, digging in the earth and tying knots. There’s a rumpled, lived-in quality to her depiction of Leonie’s first night in a sad home that suggests a shipping container, furtively laying out her poorly chosen clothes and pharmacy bag full of medications like she’s arriving at a hostel. Denis’s tenderness extends to the brutish Cal, who nervously lounges in his room, fruitlessly calling for his dog and waiting for an awkward work dinner with Horn and Leonie, to whom he feels entitled.

A student of masculinity in all its forms, Denis has three diverse specimens to turn over here, from the anxious Horn to the explosively violent Cal to the preternaturally elegant Alboury, who wears Saint Laurent Productions’ garments best, with Bankolé casually draping Alboury’s suit coat over his shoulder whenever he grows tired of waiting by the fence. There’s some irony in a luxury fashion house financing such a pared-down film with a tight cast of four dressed to impress for a late night in the desert. The futility of their performances of self is neatly summarized by Alboury, who dismisses Leonie as a stray coin that shines for no one. Though such pronouncements seem a little overwritten for Denis, and though the final act feels a bit protracted once all the pieces fall into place, The Fence still bears her unmistakable signature in everything from its moody ambiance to its shambling structure, which sets this quartet on a collision course from afar and, like Alboury, waits to see what happens. Programmes: Special Presentations; Luminaries