The Fence

Will Sloan

Blunt metaphors delivered very strangely. The bone-simple dramaturgy... the long takes and claustrophobic framing... the clashing acting styles... the constant violation of the rules of film grammar... the quiet-but-never-silent soundscape and austere mise en scène...Definitely dreamlike.

Adam Nayman

I'll write properly about this later, but like a lot of later Denis the tension here between what works and what doesn't is more interesting -- to me at least -- than the frictionlessness of some other more fully successful films.

Josh Lewis3.0

“How do we sleep while our beds are burning?” Would it shock you to learn Claire Denis made a hauntingly existential anti-colonialist drama? This one centered on the foreign boss (cop/mayor/general/father) of a construction site in West Africa who is in the process of covering up the murder of one of his local employees as a workplace accident, and slowly realizing as the man’s brother shows up and spends an entire night refusing to leave without the corpse that he is just delaying the inevitable. This is one of those adaptations of a stage play that’s incredibly obvious as it unfolds both in terms of claustrophobic chamber environment and performance style (which Isaach de Bankolé excels the most at), and there were some details about the character work I’m still marinating on whether they work or not, but I think the broad moral dilemma at play has some power to it, and Denis does find some interesting ways of photographing it beyond stagey coverage. Plenty of striking moments of location, blocking, framing, what looks like iPhone footage from the POV of dashboards and bulldozers, great dividing use of the titular fence, etc… Gonna come back to this one outside of a marathoning festival movies back to back, which is not really conducive for slowing down and meditating on/processing something like this.Further discussion on ep 399 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS, as part of our TIFF25 coverage.