Macon Film Guild screening puzzling but ultimately satisfying "White Material"

Claire Denis' "White Material," which the Macon Film Guild is screening as its February offering, is one the most challenging movies it has ever shown, but one that delivers rewards that make it well worth the effort to consume it.

As the movie opens, we find the great French actress Isabelle Huppert running down a dirt road in an unnamed African country, and just what she's running from or toward is a mystery that Denis unfolds slowly and like a good riddle, playing engaging tricks with time to bring us into this story at multiple points and from all kinds of different perspectives.

Huppert plays Maria Vial, who we eventually find out operates a coffee plantation with the family that is crumbling as quickly as is the post-colonial world around her. As bands of rebel soldiers - many of them children - close in on her beloved land to take it away, she remains as defiant as she is delusional to the reality of her surroundings, not at all unlike a modern-day Scarlett O'Hara.

This, however, isn't Tara, and as the story slowly and elliptically unfurls, we find out that Maria, while still attached to the land, is quickly becoming as estranged to her family as she is to this unnamed country. She is separated from her husband, played by Christopher Lambert, though they still operate what's left of the plantation together, and his father still lives there. Their son is a layabout who isn't engaged by much of anything until he's consumed by the heart of darkness, just many that beat through this enigmatic work.

Into the chaos of her personal and business life, Maria welcomes "The Boxer," a wounded rebel fighter played by Isaach De Bankolé, who will be familiar to fans of Jim Jarmusch movies. Though he clearly has his own band of loyal followers, he has at least as many enemies, and the discord among the rebel forces just adds to the tension of what Denis has cooked up.

And at the center of all this, its Huppert herself that gives the movie the emotional resonance that's sometimes lost in its puzzling delivery. Her frail appearance is almost completely at odds with the iron will with which she clings to this decaying empire, which just makes her seem all the more of an outsider in this place she still desperately wants to call home. It's a remarkable performance.

If you're not in Macon, keep an eye out for this on DVD and blu-ray from Criterion on April 12, but if you are, definitely turn out at the Douglass Theatre this Sunday for a unique movie that drops you into the heart of Africa for an engaging allegory about its past and present that doubles as an often mesmerizing mystery.

The best movie you'll probably hear nothing about from the Oscar nominations.

If I'm reading things right, you won't be hearing the two words "Blue Valentine" very often - if at all - when the Oscar nominations are announced Tuesday morning.

Which will be a real shame, because Derek Cianfrance's movie is the first "romance in reverse" that actually hooked me right from the start.

Until now, these types of movies have ranged from good-but-far-too-cute ("500 Days of Summer") to so bad I'd claw my eyes out to make it stop ("The Break-Up"). The difference with Cianfrance's movie is that you never doubt, even at its darkest moments, that these were two people who were once completely, even desperately in love ... or so we think at the start.

And it certainly doesn't hurt when the couple at the story's core is played by Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, who throw themselves so thoroughly into the story that it has an intimacy - and though the word is used far to often, it's right here, "raw" feeling - that we often feel like we're watching something we shouldn't be, home movies or certainly private moments that never feel like they've been staged. It's a genuine accomplishment, and though it can make for some uncomfortable viewing at several points, Cianfrance and his actors earn every high, low and in between they deliver.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. As the movie opens, we see the couple's daughter, Frankie, searching for her dog, who has gotten out of its pen. Interestingly, if you've seen Kelly Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy," you know that that movie also starred Williams as a woman who loses her dog, just about her only prized possession left in the world. Here, however, the dog is just a stepping-off point to show us how each character reacts to it.

Gosling's Dean, who we quickly learn is in many ways just a big kid himself, gets Frankie to eat her oatmeal by eating it "like a leopard," which means bite by bite off of the kitchen table. Williams' Cindy, meanwhile, tries to hold things together, getting ready for her job as a nurse and to get Frankie off to school. It's one of the many great scenes in "Blue Valentine" that sets up a dynamic that Cianfrance plays with for the rest of the movie, using tricks of time to bring us in and out of the relationship to see how they've reached this point in the space of five years or so (I can never really tell how old kids are, so that's a guess on my part.)

Other movies have certainly tried this gambit before. If you live in Macon, the film guild is showing Claire Denis' "White Material" on Feb. 13. That movie does so expertly as it tells the tale of a white family in Africa trying desperately to hold on to the coffee plantation they call home. And "500 Days of Summer" did so too, but Cianfrance doesn't rely on the cutesy day markers that set up each scene in that flick, instead dropping us in and out of scenes we never really feel completely comfortable watching, and often only in snippets, leaving the end of each to be revealed as the movie unfolds.

I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying we come into this as Dean and Cindy's marriage is imploding faster than at least one of them (Dean) knows it. To try and escape from the reality of their dog escaping - and everything else that is clearly wrong just below the surface - they ship Frankie off to her grandfather's (the great John Doman, Lt. Rawls from "The Wire") house and, at Dean's insistence, go off to spend the night in the "Future Room" at a sleazy motel. And even if you think you can picture that, you can't until you see it - a space-themed room complete with a revolving bed, which for the two doomed lovers indeed becomes a world apart, a hotel room at the end of their world.

Cianfrance plays up that for all the humor he can and finds plenty of other moments of levity to make this almost as sweet as it just as often is better, but its in the little slights between Cindy and Dean that you subtly find out how they've come to where they are now. Watch out, in particular, for what happens when Cindy runs into an old flame at the liquor store on the way to the "Future". It seems like a harmless enough encounter, and you don't find out until later just why Dean reacts to the news as he does. Cianfrance reveals this piece by piece, and believe me, it's a mystery that pays off big as the story develops.

I've gone on long enough about this for sure, but there are two other scenes worth mentioning, among many that just get seared on the brain. During their courtship, which earns every moment of cute that comes before the cold, Williams' Cindy tells perhaps the most inappropriate joke you'll ever hear in a movie, but its in the reaction to it, by both her and Dean, that you learn just why they at first, at least, belonged together.

And there's a true moment of grace (which you don't find in movies nearly often enough nowadays) just before they first meet, as Dean is moving an old man's belongings to a nursing home. It's just one more piece in the "Blue Valentine" puzzle that draws us deeper into the story, and makes it worth following all the way to the end we know is coming.

There's a lot more I could say about this - such as this is one of the only movies to truly show what happens when a guy refuses to grow up - but the bottom line is this: Derek Cianfrance's "Blue Valentine" is about as raw as a romance can get on the big screen, and one that burns with as much passion as any I can remember before flaming out, so if you can find it playing near you, definitely go see it while you still can.