35 Shots of Rum

In French director Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum, the world becomes, in author Sharon Salzberg's phrase, "transparent and illuminated, as though lit from within". It is a film of infinite tenderness in which the characters lives are delicately interwoven to build a tapestry of interconnectedness that signals life's inevitable passages. Reminiscent of Hou Hsiao-hsien's Café Lumiére with its intimate depiction of city life and the coming and going of trains, 35 Shots of Rum pays homage to Yasujiro Ozu in its story of the relationship between Lionel (Alex Descas), a train conductor of African descent whose striking features convey a sense of stoic dignity and his student daughter Josephine (Mati Diop) who is eager to assert her independence.

Like the relationship of Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara in Ozu's films, the focus is on the mundane occurrences of everyday life, the quiet intimacies in which meaning is revealed only by implication. While the characters are black, their lives are comfortably middle class and the only suggestion of racial issues is a classroom scene where Jo talks about how "the global South" is indebted to the industrial north. Set to a lovely score by the British band "Tindersticks" and gloriously choreographed by cinematographer Agnes Godard, the film opens with a ten minute montage of the crisscrossing of trains of the RER, the system that connects Paris to its suburbs.

Interspersed are close-up shots of Josephine, Lionel, and his co-worker René (Julieth Mars Toussaint) whose immanent retirement signals a depressing change in his life. As the scene shifts to a small Paris apartment, like a married couple, Lionel and Josephine settle into a domestic routine of cooking, cleaning, and showering, their relationship of father and daughter not made clear until we see a photograph of a younger Jo and her German mother. This initial opaqueness seems to pervade a film that relies on the viewer to fill in the blanks. It is clear from the outset, however, that Lionel is dependent on his daughter and fears her eventual departure.

Although he tells her reassuringly, "Don't feel I need to be looked after…Just feel free", he also lets her know her that "We have everything here. Why go looking elsewhere?" His happiness is threatened by upstairs neighbor Noé (Gregoire Colin), a scruffy-looking young man who lives with his cat and does not hide his feelings for Jo even while vowing to move to Gabon for a job. We are also introduced to Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué), a taxi driver who is attached to Lionel and may have been his lover. This unlikely quartet form an extended family and their deep seated feelings for each other are revealed in an illuminating scene in a café after their car breaks down in route to a concert.

Lionel's conflicted feelings about his daughter's growing up become apparent when the intimate dance between father and daughter to the song "Night Shift" by the Commodores is interrupted by Noé who cuts in and immediately ups the romantic ante. Lionel's jealousy is also reflected by Gabrielle shortly afterwards as she watches Lionel dancing with the café's attractive hostess. In an unexpected trip to Germany to visit a friend (or sister) of Jo's late mother's, the inner lives of the characters and the bonds that hold them together are further explored, although little happens on the surface.

To say that 35 Shots of Rum is a film of mystery belies the fact that it is also quite accessible though in a very rich and subtle way. Its achievement lies in its ability to create memorable characters and fully involve us in their lives without relying on extended conflict, outward displays of emotion, or even a coherent narrative, drawing its power from its creation of magic through silences, glances, and a loving warmth that lingers in the memory. It is one of Denis' best films.

Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum is a poignant piece of cinema about the intimacy of a father and a daughter. They know they should part ways but leaving each other is emotionally challenging for both. On the other side, both have suiters awaiting on the margin, struggling with loneliness and unfulfilled desire.

In the background, we have an alternative view of Paris, a distorted, dirty, and ugly city. Most of the characters are colored, and they were simmering with revolutionary ideas and thwarted hopes.

The film lacks a coherent narrative. It's more like a distant view of family life at a random period. We don't know much about either Lionel, the father, or his daughter Josephine, but we could infer many things from their glances and the way they touch each other. What's connecting about them is their simplicity, charm, and ambiguous charisma, which is why they only find fulfillment in each other. Their lovers - Gabrielle and Noe - seem like outsiders, and they lack the vague aura of father and daughter.

I wouldn't say I liked the movie that much, although I appreciated the masterful camera work, the elegant pace, the implicit emotional tension, and the powerful performance of the actors. It's an excellent film, but something was lacking, which is probably fervor and warmth. Ozu tackled the same issue of father-daughter attachment, yet Ozu's picture has a glow, a depth of feeling and intimacy that transcends the subject.

I like it when the movie title itself is capable of concisely threading together the themes of the movie and yet retains a unique symbolic connotation. "35 shots of rum" is a good example. The audience were left with a question mark as to what the "35 shots of rum theory" meant to the father early on in the movie, and when leaving the cinema were probably rewarded with a sonorous answer which neatly highlights and summarises the point of the movie.

In a working class Parisian family which is disintegrated by the loss of an important member, what bonds the remaining members together and keep them going? What prevents them from lying flat on the rail and let trains run all over them and wrap them up as some may choose to? "35 shots of rum" provides us with a sincere, heartfelt and highly humanised conjecture through unraveling an intimate web of relationships within the family and the neighbourhood, and reveals to the audience what meanings of life are to the characters. The story-telling is commendable and loyal to its central film throughout, making the film a structurally condensed and coherent piece of study of humanity.

Claire Denis' 35 Shots Of Rum is a sombre and humane look at a quartet of Parisians who experience loneliness, isolation and disconnection. Lionel (Alex Descas) is a train driver who lives with his daughter Josephine (Mati Diop). He has a seemingly casual relationship with taxi driver Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) who seems invested in the relationship to a much greater degree than Lionel. And Noe (Gregoire Colin) who lives alone with his cat seems to have an interest in Josephine. The trouble is that all these characters are so wrapped up in their own loneliness, they fail to communicate with one another.

They are so wrapped up, however, that it takes their car to break down in the rain for them to open up to each other. Whether this is a good thing or not is a different question. Denis shoots the film in a desolate manner that has a complete (and fitting) lack of flair, which is a direct metaphor for the characters emotional emptiness. Claire Denis has named Japanese master Yasijuro Ozu as a main influence for the film, and it is quite obvious. The quiet, restrained dignity of Lionel, and the almost silent exchanges between the characters mirror Ozu's classics Late Spring and Tokyo Story. The film can be slow at time, but stick with it and it is richly rewarding. A complex film that is powerfully acted.

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I was looking for another film by this filmmaker, promised to two readers. Unable to find it, I turned to this. I count myself lucky. It's potent stuff if you can place yourself inside.

One possible way is to note the Ozu influence. Most comments mention it. It's in the quiet family life between widowed father and his only daughter, in the dispassionate eye that gently embraces rhythms, in the lack of ego and hurt among the participants. He a train driver, attuned to a calm linear life that he controls, she a sociologist student, opening up to exploring and conceptualizing her ideas about things.

This is all a great entry, Denis films warmth, equanimity, assurance in simply the presence of two people together. There's no dissatisfaction in the routine, no loneliness in the solitude. Denis has adopted Zen indirectly via cinematic Ozu, this character is not apparent in another of her films I've seen, which only affirms that she's open and agile in her work, refusing to settle.

That's all fine in itself, I'll have this in my home over existential rumination every time, but Ozu is a bit more than tender tea in composed form. He begins with a rhythm that sets the spatiotemporal mechanism, and only after we have acquired presence does he introduce the dramatic event, usually a single one, usually marriage. The deeper thrust is that we'll go around that bend with more clarity than usual, registering transition in a cosmic way. A Japanese girl deciding on marriage was deciding on her future life after all; this needs to settle as deeply in us.

This is all about cosmic transition, albeit in even softer strokes. A larger family has been introduced in between, another woman who has feelings for the widower, a boy who has feelings for the girl. They all live in the same building. There's a lovely spatial fabric that brings them together, for instance the boy coming up the stairs pauses in the hall and intently stares at the girl's door, the intensity is that he's not just looking at a piece of wood but through that, intently as if to part the image, into the space of a possible life beyond.

So this isn't about just rhythm and composed space. It's about the neighbor woman smoking at her window hoping to see the man but not being sure this is it.

It all comes together in a marvelous scene of dancing in a small neighborhood bar, a crank has been thrown in their concert plans for the evening, their car that breaks down, so life spontaneously resumes on the spot to figure itself out. The deeper thrust is that they all have to go on. The father has to let his daughter go, the girl has to move on from the family nest, the boy has to come to terms that he might have to move on alone, the neighbor woman move on without making her feelings known. A train colleague receives his pension as the film starts, he also has to move on but can't envision another life ahead; sure enough he's discovered near the end dead on the tracks by the father.

The game with 35 shots is another entry; they do it, the father muses in a bar, to mark something that only happens once, life in a broader sense.

The ending poses a conundrum. You'll probably have a sense of what Denis is trying to accomplish by that point. She has removed the one thing that significantly held Ozu back, explaining from the outside. So she's looking to embody the transition that is more than an event. Indirectly this brings her in line with every other filmmaker currently worth knowing in the attempt to create a new visual logic for becoming conscious. Denis is uniquely equipped in having seen Tarkovsky at work. So the film becomes muddled, crispness must go at that point. The whole idea is that they are both in the end still unsure about it, this is anchored in the nervous image of the boy in the hall. Did she do it?