Though full of a distinct sense of atmosphere and compelling performances, Claire Denis’ “The Fence” is a work that could be mistaken for being more slight upon first glance. Based on the Bernard-Marie Koltès play “Black Battles with Dogs,” it’s a dialogue-heavy film that is largely confined to a single location, a construction site in Africa where a death has occurred.
However, for those who have seen her recent films, such as the haunting “High Life,” you’ll know that Denis has never let even the smallest of stories feel insignificant. If anything, the more she hones in on people and draws us into their worlds, the more it is that we can feel something quietly immense grabbing hold of us.
The same is true with “The Fence” as it becomes clear that the acclaimed French director is returning to some of the ideas she has explored about colonization in films like the essential “Beau Travail” while almost ending up somewhere closer to a type of spiritual horror where the loss at the film’s core slowly consumes everything in its path.
It’s not her best work by any means (that remains the painfully transcendent “Trouble Every Day”), but it’s something that can’t be dismissed either. For all the ways it can feel like she’s working through some of the more agonizing elements boiling underneath the film, the entire framing is about intentionally holding us at a distance until the casual cruelty that set everything in motion makes that impossible. It’s cinema as a reckoning, but one that also shows how inefficient such reckonings can be when the wheels of violence just keep on turning.
The one caught in the wheels of this violence is an African worker (Brian Begnan) who supposedly died in an accident while working at the construction site. His brother Alboury, played by the always excellent Isaach De Bankolé, then comes to retrieve his body and bring him back home. Despite the increasingly ridiculous excuses of the British construction supervisor, Horn (Matt Dillon), he stands and waits. And waits. And waits some more.
Soon, we see Horn’s underling Cal (Tom Blyth) is going to retrieve his wife, Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce) for him. Horn, desperately clinging to a false tranquility with the hope that all can be fixed when she arrives, does everything he can to try to get Alboury to leave. He doesn’t and things steadily grow more tense as Leonie gets closer to the construction site.
This all seems quite simple on paper, but underneath every line of dialogue is a growing sense of unease that Denis contrasts with the ordinary rhythms of the site. Never once overplaying her hand, she lets us begin to understand the everyday cost of doing business that the site pays in money and the community in human lives. We see how Horn is familiar with paying off families after their loved ones die and doesn’t think this will be any different.
Yet as the night grows darker, the two increasingly go back and forth, neither seeming like they will move an inch. Then, you see how Horn’s excuses are becoming more cowardly rationalizations and eventual confessions that whither under the piercing stare of De Bankolé. Even as Dillon is the one with more to do and dialogue to speak, it’s an outstanding De Bankolé who holds the camera with such intensity that you don’t dare look away for even a second.
As shot by the excellent cinematographer Eric Gautier, who previously collaborated with Denis on “Both Sides of the Blade” and “Stars at Noon,” everything about the site and the fence that separates the two men makes it feel as though we’re trapped in some sort of purgatory. One could reduce the film to a morality play with neat answers, but it’s more of a technically focused deconstruction of violence and desire than it is anything else. Just as Leonie’s arrival reveals how Cal is jealous of Horn, the violence that always remains just out of frame becomes something that those inside the fence try to keep buried. But there is no keeping such things buried, no matter how much the characters desperately try.
When everything is then inevitably dug up and laid out in the open, there’s something almost intentionally unsatisfying about the moment. A flashback, a narrative device Denis has always tended to forcibly lean on in her films to spell out information, that should be shattering actually feels woefully inevitable when we already know that the “accident” at the beginning of the film was just the common story that Horn tells on behalf of his bosses.
In every camera move Denis makes and each restrained yet riveting line delivery from De Bankolé, this all eventually gets broken down. When “The Fence” proceeds to leave this site of violence behind, the lack of justice or catharsis is the point. Though a small film in many regards, it’s the quiet despair we arrive at and the death that gets shouldered where we feel the film’s weight crushing down on those still outside the fence all the same.