Toronto film festival: French director has made of one her least effective movies with this dull and clunkily adapted version of 1979 play with a miscast Matt Dillon at its centre
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fter trips to space (2018’s High Life) and Nicaragua (2022’s Stars at Noon), the French director Claire Denis has returned to more familiar territory: post-colonial west Africa. Denis, who grew up in several Francophone African countries, has made several movies that inquire into the troubled heart of such places, and now reaches into that well again for her new film, The Fence. In some ways, the film is hallmark Denis, flinty and strange and sometimes inscrutable. But it is also a disappointment, a leaden film whose points Denis has made more convincingly elsewhere.
The Fence is based on a 1979 play by the late Bernard Marie-Koltès called Black Battles with Dogs. It tells the story of three white people living in a protected construction zone in a rural part of an unnamed west African nation. A fatal accident, or something more sinister, has just happened on the work site and the brother of the deceased comes to claim the body. At the same time, the young wife of the site’s foreman has arrived from abroad to stay for a while, rippling the waters of this treacherous, masculine ecosystem. Denis has updated the setting and added some modern geopolitical context, but the theatrical origins of The Fence are felt throughout, to bad effect. This is, perhaps, one play that should have stayed a play.
