Did You Know There’s a New Claire Denis Film Out?

“I prefer the softness of the shadows.” These words are uttered early on in Claire Denis’s The Fence by Isaach de Bankolé’s stoic Alboury, who has come to a construction site in West Africa to recover his younger brother’s body. Across the literal fence that divides the large site from the dusty landscape surrounding it, the beleaguered foreman Horn (Matt Dillon) tries to negotiate with Alboury. He offers him money, conversation, a drink. He invites him into the compound to sit with him in the light. But Alboury, proper and solemn in his gray suit, refuses Horn’s entreaties. All he wants is the body of his brother, the circumstances of whose death remain vague. While assorted hothouse histrionics rage inside the compound, Alboury remains outside the fence, watching and refusing to budge, like a messenger from a more moral universe. And Denis shoots him like it. The director has been making films with de Bankolé for decades now (he starred in her feature debut, Chocolat, back in 1988), and here she lets him linger in the darkness, sometimes barely visible. Those soft shadows give him an enigmatic authority. We see just enough of his pain, but it’s transmitted to us as a kind of immovability.

Let’s step back for a second. After a tepid response on the festival circuit last year, The Fence is now finally here, but it feels like it’s been abandoned. Despite the fact that Denis remains one of the great filmmakers of our time (2022’s Both Sides of the Blade was one of her greatest works), her latest premieres this week on AMC+ with zero fanfare, after a clandestine weeklong New York theatrical run. That’s a shame. The Fence may not be one of her better efforts, but it has an interesting and somewhat personal backstory. It’s based on the 1979 French play Black Battles With Dogs from the late writer Bernard-Marie Koltès, who died of complications from AIDS in 1989. Koltès had written the character of Alboury for de Bankolé, one of his closest friends. During a visit to one of Denis’s sets toward the end of his life, Koltès and the director speculated about adapting the play for film; Denis promised him before he died that she would one day make it. (It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, apparently: Denis says that Koltès was at one point so ill that he hallucinated that she had already made the picture.)

So The Fence represents a kind of dream project and also maybe something of a curse, a promise the director felt indebted to keep. Denis has taken her liberties with the material, but the absurdism of Koltès’s work remains, with its odd bursts of behavior and its uneasy mix of melodrama and symbolism, not to mention the theatrical dialogue. It’s a strange movie, to be sure. While Alboury and Horn continue their standoff, the latter’s young wife, Leone (Mia McKenna Bruce, the radiant star of 2024’s How to Have Sex), arrives in town, dressed in heels and sporting a purse with “Babe” written on it. She’s sweet and curious and not at all suited to this desolate and very male construction compound. Driving her from the airport, Horn’s strapping and younger second-in-command, Cal (Tom Blyth), gives her a hard time: At first it seems like a culture clash, but eventually we understand that Cal himself has an intense, almost homoerotic attachment to Horn, one that’s also threatened because the company is about to be sold to the Chinese, which means Horn will soon be leaving. Cal is responsible, we suspect, for the death of Alboury’s brother, so his attachment to the boss isn’t just spiritual; it’s also practical and urgent. (To both complicate and further symbolize matters, Horn himself has been castrated by what we’re told was a construction accident.)

Denis can pull off melodrama, and she can certainly pull off the kind of abstraction into which The Fence eventually descends. But the theatrical and self-aware quality of Koltès’s work suffers when forced to exist in the kind of textured worlds Denis creates. His play exists in quotes; her film, at its best, is earthy, sensuous, immediate. In that context, the dialogue between Alboury and Horn can feel stilted, its repetitions playing less like an evocation of something timeless and more like stagy dithering. Similarly, the domestic back-and-forth with Leone and Horn and Cal never seems to go anywhere. Conceptually, perhaps it was meant to be tinged with irony, but Denis’s cast plays it straight, which drains it of power and complexity. One wonders if the play might have been better served on film if Denis had kept just the premise and completely reimagined everything else.

Every so often, though, the director gives us a moment of intimacy or mystery that reminds us why she’s singular. Watching Leone in a red slip as she walks through the compound’s bleak, industrial spaces at night, we intuit more about this world than we might from reams of script. The dialogue between Alboury and Horn might not always work, but it’s hard to tear our eyes away from their competing figures, one grimy and nervous, the other grave and immobile. The camp watchmen sing to each other at dusk. A woman quietly places a palm frond on a puddle of blood. The Fence is not a great movie, but there is often great beauty in it. It certainly doesn’t deserve to disappear.