One of the biggest disappointments for me at the fall festivals was Claire Denis’ “The Fence” which currently sits at 55 on Metacritic.
In the film, Denis returns to familiar terrain: post-colonial West Africa, where she spent much of her childhood. The result is, frustratingly, stagey. This is a wooden work, a film whose points she has made with more precision, more fire, elsewhere.
The film has project supervisor Horn (Matt Dillon) welcoming his young wife (Mia McKenna-Bruce) into the hut he shares with young and impetuous engineer Cal (Tom Blyth). Suddenly, a man called Alboury (Isaach de Bankolé) appears outside the railings surrounding their quarters. He is determined to stay there until they return the body of his brother to him, who was killed on the site.
The plot here is almost negligible: the film is essentially one long, endlessly repeating argument over a corpse. Larger ideas hover at the edges, but never penetrate. Unlike Denis’s “Beau Travail,” with its taut, bracing sense of history and menace, “The Fence” simply didn’t ignite for me.
Denis is coming off back-to-back 2022 releases, “Both Sides of the Blade” and “Stars at Noon,” and at the time she had hinted at retirement—only to return with “The Fence” this year. In interviews, she has mentioned already starting work on another film, so this will likely not be the last we hear from her.
“Stars at Noon” is actually an overlooked gem. While it didn’t receive much critical praise, it features Margaret Qualley’s best performance—restless, magnetic, and playful. The film’s loose, wandering structure blurred romance, thriller, and political drama into a truly unique narrative.
Denis has been making films for over four decades, and among her finest are “Beau Travail,” “35 Shots of Rum,” and “Chocolat.” If anything, “The Fence” is just a glitch.
The short version: "Woman Unknown" was a compromise. The jury deadlocked over "Possible Love" and "NAZA," not able to com to terms, fell back on their #3, May el-Toukhy's film.