Isabelle Huppert in New York
French cinema icon Isabelle Huppert takes the spotlight this weekend, as New York City’s Metrograph theater launches a mini-retrospective of her four-decade career. Among the highlights of the series is Claire Denis’s 2009 White Material, which stars the actor as a French woman living in an unnamed African country, where civil war and racial conflict have led to the demise of her family’s coffee plantation. Deftly combining Huppert’s characteristic intensity with Denis’s intimate style, this provocative look at the ever-shifting power dynamics of colonialism is also a rich character study of a woman hell-bent on surviving in an increasingly brutal landscape.
Before White Material plays this Saturday, read Amy Taubin’s liner notes for our release, which describe the film as “a nightmare from which no one awakes.” Also, check out our interview with Huppert from earlier this year.
