TIFF Film Review: Claire Denis' "The Fence" is Tense, Bleak, and a Bit Unsure of Itself

In a post-screening Q+A session at TIFF on September 12, director Claire Denis seemed unsure if her latest film, The Fence, could be considered "well-done."

Based on Bernard-Marie Koltès' play Black Battles with Dogs, The Fence centers a face-off between two men on the edge of a construction site in West Africa. Horn (Matt Dillon), a construction foreman, is confronted by a local named Alboury (Isaach de Bankolé), who arrives in the dead of night to claim the body of his brother, who was killed on Horn's site.

Horn, who is awaiting a visit from his wife Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce), demands that Alboury either join him inside for a drink, or leave the premises and return in the morning. In turn, Alboury refuses Horn's terms and stands his ground outside the fence—much to the increasing agitation of Cal (Tom Blyth), a drunken construction worker and colleague of Horn's who has a bigger role in the brother's death than we are initially led to think.

The Fence's theatrical origins show, at times to great advantage, in the firm planting of its scenes within minimal sets and the intense monologues performed most notably by Horn and Cal. The result is a sense of limited mobility between claustrophobically sparse and dimly-lit spaces, and a feeling that Horn and Cal are talking to nobody but themselves as they attempt to rationalize away the blame they must ultimately take for the brother's death.

Dillon's performance in particular has an almost comic insincerity. In each iteration of the central conflict at the fence, he swings between condescending niceties as he compliment Alboury's English (and forgets the name of the man killed on his site), pleas for understanding (he's only the foreman, you see, he has no real authority), and violent rage towards the ever-unwavering Alboury.

Post-colonial racial tensions, masculinity, and homosociality—themes already familiar to Denis' oeuvre—come to play in The Fence as Horn's relationships to his work, Alboury, Cal, and Leonie develop over the course of an almost unrelentingly tense hour-and-a-half. The titular fence that separates Horn and Alboury makes visible the invisible barriers that separate the two—race, belonging, mobility, culture, and capital—and highlights the white characters' confinement within the construction site and subjection to the oppositional gaze of Alboury (and the local watchmen standing above the site in a watchtower).

Every explosive moment, from fireworks to gunshots to a physical brawl between Horn and Cal, only adds to the tension looming above the film. At its strongest, The Fence is dark and menacing, its central conflicts playing out like a pressure cooker without a release valve.

However, the film's uncertainty shows somewhat in the development of its peripheral characters and its grim, yet underwhelming daylight finale.

For instance, there's Leonie, who wanders aimlessly through the construction site in a red nightdress and heels, neglected by the preoccupied Horn. Her status as a young, out-of-place European wife whose gaze pierces through the overwhelmingly male interactions is fascinating. However, this is overwhelmed by a not-so-convincing love-hate relationship with a not-so-convincing Cal that culminates in the final conflict.

Alboury is another character worth further exploration. Although he is played commandingly by an Saint Laurent suit-clad Isaach de Bankolé, he is given quite little to work with outside of a speech delivered to his brother during an early nightmarish sequence.

Ultimately, despite these insecurities, The Fence delivers on its central themes. Denis stated in the post-screening Q+A that she made this film after promising Bernard-Marie Koltès, who died of complications related to AIDS in 1989, to adapt his play to film. While she expressed difficulties in adapting the story across mediums, there are some truly effective uses of theatricality to showcase the fundamental disconnects between the film's characters.

The Fence can be dark, bleak, and uncertain, just like the world around it. Though it can lose its footing, ultimately it is an important story about who gets to set the terms of agreement in post-colonial political negotiations, as well as the obligations we must uphold, or turn away from, when the time comes to decide.