The fence of the title isn’t a terribly imposing one: a utilitarian, standard-issue wire border, easy bent or broken down, and affording no protection from outside eyes. But it’s the heaviest symbol of many in Claire Denis’s stripped-back, forthright new film, a barrier between haves and have-nots that proves as fixed and obdurate as the two men on either side of it, and the tensely opposed societies they stand for. On the inside are the outsiders, white western interlopers making would-be intruders of those whose land they’ve stepped on and built on — “a construction site in West Africa,” as an opening title card simply declares. Many things are simple in “The Fence,” an unusually sharp-cornered and rhetorical work from this typically elliptical and sensuous filmmaker, but the rage swelling beneath its still, mannered surface is not.
As much as “The Fence” represents a departure for the…
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