Troubled souls trapped: the parameters of a typical Claire Denis narrative are rarely complex. Beau Travail’s French Foreign Legion soldiers were confined to their base in Djibouti, High Life’s condemned criminals to their spacecraft, and The Fence’s action occurs almost entirely on a construction site, in an unspecified part of West Africa, over a single night. These are often threadbare or aimless narratives, heavy with overt symbolism, limited in scope and breadth. For Denis, it’s not the mechanics of a plot, imposing itself upon the characters, that concerns her, but rather the mechanics of these characters and their troubled souls, and how these troubles manifest in their collective confinement.
In The Fence, confinement is contradictory. White foreigners live within the titular wire fence surrounding their site, the most simply defined parameter for any narrative. Within the fence, they exercise reckless freedoms afforded them by privileges never fully elucidated — Denis’ symbolism is as overt as her specifics are often vague. One of these foreigners, Cal (Tom Blyth), may be responsible for the death of a local worker; after nightfall, a man claiming to be the deceased’s brother, Alboury (Isaach de Bankolé), appears at the fence, demanding the return of the body. The site manager, Horn (Matt Dillon), attempts to negotiate, but is unable to sway Alboury, who holds his position throughout the long, increasingly fraught night. His confinement is less physical, with the entirety of the rural landscape behind him. But the fence traps him too, preventing him both from access to his brother’s body and from access to the truth surrounding his death.
Adapted from Bernard-Marie Koltès’ play Black Battles with Dogs, The Fence is a chamber piece that represents the sparsest Denis has yet gone in her many cinematic explorations of humanity’s tormented passions, be they perverse, violent, or romantic. All are present here — for all its conceptual bareness, The Fence is also one of Denis’ most tempestuous works on an emotional level. Cal, a man driven seemingly by curious personal insecurities, is dangerous and unpredictable. Beneath Alboury’s disquieting stoicism lies a profound pain. Then there’s Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Horn’s new wife, whose arrival at the site at almost the same time as Alboury’s may seem incidental, yet her presence facilitates certain changes in perspective for the three central male characters, some worrying, some encouraging. Leonie is both the story’s most stable figure and its most vulnerable; her appearance on the veranda of Horn’s cabin in a little red slip dress is an especially striking, enigmatically expressive image.
Denis doesn’t draw tension from obvious sources here — the mystery and thriller elements of Koltès’ plot are minimized as Denis and co-writers Suzanne Lindon and Andrew Litvack continually subvert expectations, both of where the story ought to lead and where individual scenes or moments ought to lead. Broad signifiers of suspense dissipate into insignificance — a dirt road car chase that’s really just an overtaking, the disappearance of Cal’s dog that amounts to nothing. Instead, tension is built through casual, almost throwaway details, such as Cal’s unprovoked adoption of “babe” to refer to Leonie. There’s a sense of extreme subjectivity, the feeling of spending time in a strange place with strange people; when Cal rants about his envy of oil men, as a construction man himself, his fervour for a topic surely few (if any) will sympathize with or even understand is jarring and unsettling.
There’s a fascinating interplay here between verbal expression and physical expression, a common characteristic of Denis’ work. Dialogue is plain, straightforward, even cumbersome, occasionally theatrical and almost official; the placement of bodies within the frame is casual, vocal delivery is naturalistic, performances are raw and rich with the quietest nuances. Horn and Leonie’s reunion scene is long, captured in a single take, a moment of importance for both characters, yet their conversation is informal, slightly tentative, almost perfunctory. The disconnect between disparate elements directs one’s attention toward each in turn — we notice as much what the characters’ words say as what their bodies say. There may be no filmmaker working today as dynamic as Denis in capturing physical emotional articulation — there are some thrilling, brief moments here, as when her camera jolts upward to follow a gun firing overhead, or a fleeting insert of Leonie’s hands clenched by her side next to the hem of her little red dress.
Moments such as these aside, though, Denis has never been this spare nor this stately before. It’s easy to see what drew her to Koltès’ play — she’s covered the topic of white people interfering in post-colonial territories before in movies like Chocolat, White Material, and Stars at Noon, and grew up in several countries in French colonial Africa. But it’s also hard to see what Koltès’ play brings out in her that she hasn’t brought out more persuasively in those movies. Yet both her political perspective and her artistic perspective remain worthy of attention and respect — even in one of her less inspired works, Denis is capable of a vibrancy, and a singularity of style, that’s practically unmatched in contemporary cinema. That she’s so gifted, then, makes it all the more disappointing that she should resort to such a shamelessly blatant use of AI in a key scene in The Fence. She accomplished some of cinema’s most extraordinary sci-fi imagery in High Life on a reported budget of just €8 million, but now, just a few years later, she’s taking that most unethical technical shortcut for one single scene. It’s an unfortunate mark against both Denis and The Fence, and all the more unfortunate because otherwise it’s another brilliant movie from a brilliant director.
Published as part of London Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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