It is unclear where Alboury, the character played by the great Isaach De Bankolé in Claire Denis’ scorching, powerfully mythic new film The Fence, works or lives. It is not even clear if he is a corporeal person or some apparition generated by history and the murmurings of the unquiet dead.
Whatever Alboury does or does not do, he would make for a superb police officer. Because soon after he appears outside the ugly, prison-like foreign construction site run in an unnamed West African country by expat Horn (Matt Dillon) and starts asking for the body of his dead brother Nouofia, Horn begins confessing to and finding alibis for all manner of things Alboury has not even asked him about.
Horn is clearly riddled with guilt. He just isn’t certain what he is guilty of.
The mystery of how Nouofia died is eventually revealed. The quiet, still tiredness of Alboury’s face suggests he does not need to know. Appearing seemingly out of nowhere in a crisply pressed tie and jacket and repeatedly asking for his brother’s body, he represents an unnerving and unwavering obstacle that does not fit into Horn’s understanding of the land where he works.
Insisting nothing can be done until morning, Horn tries everything from his worn bag of tricks to make Alboury recant his simple request. Offering money, causing delays, and even flattery to discourage Alboury’s persistence gets Horn nowhere. While turning away from his side of the fence several times, Horn keeps returning to Alboury, like a penitent who seeks forgiveness but will not ask for it.
There is a lot to unpack with The Fence, and Claire Denis does not make it simple. Adapting her friend Bernard-Marie Koltès’ 1979 play Black Battles with Dogs without dropping the original’s staginess, she makes the film a swirl of chaos and disconnection, filled with characters doing frequently nonsensical things they do not even seem to understand.
Adding to Horn’s agitation is the intersection of multiple disruptions to what looks to be a very fragile balancing act. He is rushing to finish clearing out the site before its new Chinese operators take over. Meanwhile, his new wife Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce) is arriving for an ill-considered visit, and his second-in-command, Cal (Tom Blyth), is coming unglued due to a very poorly-kept secret.
The three make for a chaotic stew. Cal seethes over Leonie’s arrival, whether out of resentment for being made to pick her up at the dusty landing strip or out of some buried jealousy over Horn’s divided attentions. Leonie, a young nurse who arrives in heels and a suitcase full of clothing better suited for a night out than a remote construction site surrounded by watchtowers with armed guards, exudes an eager but misdirected energy that suggests she does not know why she has been summoned to West Africa.
Horn is brash, impatient, and cocky, but starting to come apart, like a swollen fruit left out in the baking tropical sun. As The Fence‘s story advances, his outlook becomes grimmer. Just wait until the Chinese get here, he says at one point to Alboury, implying that the new foreign exploiters of cheap labor and raw materials will be even worse than the Europeans.
The Fence is heavily allegorical and mythic from the start, though it does not insist on making sense of these elements outside of the aftermath of colonialism. It arrives filled with symbolic figures, ostentatiously circuitous dialogue, and a looming sense of some great reckoning which feels channeled from the mind of a Greek tragedian.
Some of the standout moments have nothing to do with the story. These range from the eerily beautiful, like the watchtower guards singing to each other in mournful tones through the night, to the quirkily satiric, such as Cal loudly singing along to Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning”, repeating the lyric “it belongs to them / let’s give it back” without any irony.
Though overlapping with many of Claire Denis’ works, which examine the knotted legacies of Europeans in post-colonial Africa (her great 2010 film White Material, also featuring De Bankolé, is close in spirit if not execution), The Fence avoids being about any one defined topic. Absurdly comedic at times, the film is also dense with import and meaning, with each character’s cultural signifiers dragging a lot of baggage, whether in the form of duty-free clothing or the body of a needlessly killed relative.