Isabelle Huppert appears in so many films that her name – perhaps only equal to that of Deneuve, Depardieu or Binoche – today has become synonymous with French stardom. Among these other internationally recognised French actors, however, Huppert stands out for a certain hardiness, a tautness, a seemingly ageless energy. In this essay, I chart how Isabelle Huppert's ability to serve as a symbol of unflagging French femininity unites two seemingly unconnected films: Rithy Panh's 2008 adaptation of Marguerite Duras's Un barrage contre le Pacifique (The Sea Wall, 1950) and Claire Denis's White Material (2009). I argue that Isabelle Huppert's appearance in these two films reveals the relationship between the image of French whiteness and the history of colonial Othering. Imbued with her characteristic wiry resolve – first, in the 1930s in French Indochina, and next, following the turn of the 21st century in an unnamed African country – Huppert plays a white mother on colonised or recently decolonised land. These performances reflect one another: women abandoned by the French men in their lives, left behind by the French nation, fighting for land that they will never truly own, surrounded and eventually swallowed by the fallout of imperial machinations. This uncanny doubling of Huppert at each film's centre allows Panh and Denis to pivot easily to what is truly at stake: those occupying (and relegated to) the margins. In this essay, following a line of sight starring Isabelle Huppert, I trace a particular path of destruction (and deconstruction) of what Jacques Derrida terms ‘white mythology’. I argue that Huppert's double billing has the surprising effect of undermining binary white/non-white (or European/non-European) imperial logic and inscribes these films with the desire to approach the Other. Derrida's essay, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, attacks the authority grounding whiteness: western metaphysics and particularly the positivist legacy of the Enlightenment. In both Un barrage contre le Pacifique and White Material, this whiteness – that which claims authority by virtue of its own logic – comes under attack. Huppert sits squarely in the centre of this attack; she is the dominant white figure in the frame, but also the victim of the white mythology which offers ‘reasonable’ laws constructed on the basis of theft. Both films show the basic instability in these laws as reason fails to prevail.