Denis's latest film returns to the West African setting of her first, Chocolat, but replaces the restraint of that period piece with an apocalyptic vision of the postcolonial present. Isabelle Huppert brings characteristic clenched ferocity to the role of Maria Vial, the proprietor of a coffee plantation in an unnamed country that is collapsing into civil war. Delusionally resolute in her attachment to her African home, Maria refuses to join other white residents who are fleeing to France. “Dirty whites . . . they don't deserve this beautiful land,” she says; but who does deserve it? The child soldiers swarming around the rebel known as the Boxer (Isaach de Bankolé)? Or Maria's own son, who awakens from privileged lassitude into a delirious racial fury? Shuffling anxiously beautiful images into a fragmented flashback structure, Denis suggests a vivid but unstable reality, as though in Maria's ruptured world, not only times but time itself had changed.
—Juliet Clark