‘The Fence’ San Sebastian Review: Claire Denis’s Uneven Return to Africa

Claire Denis has returned to North Africa many times in her career, from her debut Chocolat (1988) to her latest feature The Fence. Yet never has the setting felt as inert as it does here—and I don’t mean that in a good way. The problem with this adaptation from the director of High Life and Beau Travail is that it rarely manages to break free from the sensation of watching filmed theater. One gets the sense that the material might have had more power on stage, in a more compressed form, but as a film it stretches its conflicts thin, circling back on itself until irritation begins to set in. The themes are there, the conflicts are clear, but the cinematic language chosen to express them feels stuck in a loop.

The central issue can be summed up by the image that gives the film its title: a fence. On one side stands Horn (Matt Dillon), a foreign foreman overseeing the construction of some vaguely defined industrial project in the desert. On the other side, Alboury (Isaach de Bankolé, a longtime Denis collaborator), who demands that Horn return the body of his dead brother. Horn refuses. Again and again, the film returns to this standoff: Horn trying to bargain, threaten, or buy his way out, and Alboury, calm but resolute, refusing every offer. These exchanges repeat so insistently, with so little modulation, that one begins to wonder if Denis is attempting some kind of avant-garde exercise—or if the film reel itself has accidentally been looped.

There is more at play before the narrative settles into that circular rhythm. Horn is expecting the arrival of his young English girlfriend, Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce). The task of fetching her from the city falls to Cal (Tom Blyth), a volatile young man who also works for the company. Their drive is charged with hints of sexual tension and unspoken menace, and Cal may in fact be linked to the mysterious death that sets everything in motion. For a moment, the film seems to promise something more feverish, more dangerous. But soon enough, those threads retreat to the background, as Denis narrows her focus to the symbolic tug-of-war across the fence: the corporate boss versus the man of principle, the logic of capital against the dignity of the colonized.

The source material here is Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1979 play Black Battles with Dogs, a text very much of its time, written in the wake of decolonization and suffused with suspicion about Western projects in the so-called Third World. The presence of dogs and other animals—peripheral yet thematically suggestive—comes straight from the play. On screen, however, the tension between Horn, Leonie, and Cal proves more intriguing than the political allegory Denis insists on underlining. What really happened to the dead worker? Was it an accident, a killing, a cover-up? The film withholds clear answers until the final stretch, but by then, the sense of urgency has evaporated.

There are side episodes—a dinner that never quite starts, cryptic fragments from the characters’ pasts, odd diversions that flare up and then vanish. Occasionally these shake the narrative, but rarely do they deepen the central debate. Instead, they highlight the film’s curious inertia. Denis, whose best work thrums with sensual detail and unpredictable rhythms, seems here to be struggling. Even with the contribution of cinematographer Eric Gautier, this may be her flattest-looking film to date: the desert palette, rather than evoking heat and menace, comes across as visually drained.

What remains is a protracted argument between two men, standing on opposite sides of a fence, each embodying a worldview that cannot be reconciled. Symbolically, that has weight. Dramatically, it grows wearying. For a director who has built her reputation on capturing what happens in the spaces between violence and tenderness, between power and desire, The Fence feels strangely literal, almost paralyzed. It is not that the film lacks ideas—on the contrary, it has too few ways of giving them cinematic life.