In a remote town in Cameroon lives a sole white family during the last days of France's African colonies. Marc Dalens, the often-travelling regional administrator; his wife Aimée, who does her best to stave off frustration and boredom with household activities; and their young daughter France, who cultivates a special and loving friendship with the native servant boy Protée. But as France and her mother attempt to move past the established boundaries between themselves and the native Africans, the family's ordered world is threatened with chaos when a plane full of strangers makes a forced landing nearby, its arrival unleashing a torrent of simmering resentments, racism and repressed passions.
The disastrous effects of French colonialism are examined through the paradigm of a young girl's coming of age in French West Africa. As France, a woman travelling alone in Cameroon, slips into a dreamy and distant flashback to her childhood days, scenes of a transient existence come into focus. France's father, a district governor, and her fragile mother are living a relatively peaceful if somewhat strained existence when a small plane carrying a gaggle of French imperialists and their entourage makes an emergency landing near their house. An ex-seminary drifter, a white plantation owner and his African concubine, and a newly-wed couple are forced to stay with the family, causing tensions and troubles that were bubbling barely below the surface to silently erupt. Sexual tensions, as well as social and class struggles, explode, with expansive vistas of Cameroon as an astonishing yet innocent backdrop. The heat, the landscape, and the underlying and eroticised tension converge as the noble and austere houseboy, Protée, becomes the focus of France's memories and regrets.
Claire Denis's beautifully photographed first feature from 1988, a loosely autobiographical story adapted from her childhood memories, observes closely yet non-judgmentally through gestures and glances, the intricate nature of relationships in a decaying colonial society.
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