Denis returns to Africa--the setting of her first film CHOCOLAT (and of her own childhood)--for a harrowing heart-of-darkness tale about white colonialists losing their grip on both sanity and political power. Based loosely on Doris Lessing’s novel The Grass is Singing, the film gives Huppert a tailor-made role as a settler in an unnamed African country who refuses to abandon her coffee plantation when a violent rebellion overruns the area. The film’s fluid, fragmented use of subjective camerawork impressively captures the sense of disorientation that occurs when internal and external chaos feed off each other.
