35 Rum

This movie opens with about ten minutes of watching commuter trains running around the Paris area. We get views from the inside as well as out. You begin to wonder what is going on, is this a film directed by some train obsessed person? But, no, the opening scenes set a mood and briefly introduce us to two of the main characters: Lionel, a train engineer, and Joséphine, his daughter. (Is it just a coincidence that Lionel's name is the same as the model train company's?)

After the opening scenes we see Lional and Joséphine in their small but comfortable apartment in the Paris suburbs. Details of their ordinary domestic life are presented at some length. Lional and Joséphine are so at ease with each other that you assume they are husband and wife, but then you are surprised to learn they are father and daughter. Finally we are introduced to the two other people in the apartment complex whose lives intertwine with Lionel and Josèpine: Gabrielle, a taxi driver who has had more than a casual interest in Lionel for many years, and Noé, a young, peripatetic bohemian who has interest in Joséphine. Following the shifting relationships among these four people is the substance of the movie.

Dramatic tensions are developed with quiet subtly. Those seeking histrionics will not find them here. The pivotal scene has no dialog. While dancing in a café to the Commodores "Nightshift" and Ralph Tamer's "Siboney," the entire emotional tone between the characters turns. What a beautiful scene.

What attracted me to this film was the gradual way we learn about the people and come to care about them. In contrast, however, compressed into the final scenes are surprising revelations.

If you like quiet, character-driven films, then you will probably like this. Otherwise, probably not.

I liked everything about this movie. I liked spending time with these characters, and the performances were spot on. I liked the moody aesthetic of the film, the music (I haven't heard "Nightshift" in YEARS!) and the cinematography fit beautifully. I liked how the relationships between the personalities gradually unfolded and revealed themselves. But the operative word here is "like." Although I can't find anything to criticize, I can't find anything that deserves exceptional praise either. It's a thoughtful movie, it's a nice movie... it's a good, solid understated drama. It just wasn't anything more than that. I often wondered if there was some subtext I wasn't picking up on, which is highly possible. For whatever reason, although I enjoyed it, it didn't leave much of an impression.

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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This movie has the subtlety and tenderness of a miniature painting. The charm is hidden in infinitesimal details.

The long opening sequence that watches without haste commuter trains running toward the large city calls in mind Ozu, and, yes, the movie is a tribute to the great Japanese master: a replica to Late Spring, offering at least two surprises.

Firstly, it's Ozu filtered through the lens of Hou Hsiao-Hsien: a replica to Late Spring calling in mind Café Lumière; a French director reenacting a Japanese classic with the sensibility of a modern Taiwanese.

Secondly, while transplanting the Japanese movie from 1949 in today's Paris, 35 Rhums explores other potentialities of the story. Which opens new horizons: after all, the choices made by the heroes in Late Spring raise questions with multiple answers.

Like in Late Spring there is a widowed father with a daughter in her twenties. The father is of African descent, a train engineer at RER (the transit system around Paris). The daughter is studying anthropology. Like in Late Spring, both have a quiet middle-class life in the outskirts of the big city. For the father the same dilemma: realizing that the daughter should leave him and make her own life. Like in Late Spring, there is a prospect groom for the daughter, also a prospect new wife for the father. The friend who got remarried in Late Spring (a warning against loneliness) became in 35 Rhums a coworker just retired and getting quickly alienated by solitude. Even the father's assistant from Late Spring, briefly viewed as a possible match for the girl, is appearing here in 35 Rhums: a colleague of the daughter, briefly trying to date her.

The two stories keep (loosely) the same line. The quiet and warm everyday between father and daughter is disrupted by a chain of totally unconnected events leading to the same conclusion: the daughter will build her own life, the father will face loneliness (getting space now for the 35 shots of rum). Even the trip made by father and daughter before her marriage can be found in both movies: a trip that offers the chance to talk about the long missing mother. The trip in Late Spring is to the ancient city of Kyoto, while in 35 Rhums it is to mother's birthplace: a German town that kept its medieval allure. But the similarities between the two movies end here.

Unlike the Japanese classic, 35 Rhums is not interested at all in the plot. Without making the connection to Late Spring you wouldn't get it too much. You would realize at some point that both father and daughter speak also German fluently, you should then realize that the mother was (maybe) born in Germany, you wouldn't get it what's with the 35 shots of whatever, and were you to be too stubborn, you wouldn't even get it who's getting eventually married with whom.

And that is because for the French director it is the web of human relationships that counts. Human relations, their warmth, their potentialities, never totally fulfilled, the never told dreams and hopes, the brief looks that speaks tones of volumes where words would say nothing, this is what Claire Denis is looking for in this movie. Discovering the unseen light that comes from within, celebrating it as infinite joy, and infinite ambiguity, of love; celebrating the mundane as scene for this ambiguous, pure, infinite, love. It's Ozu seen through the lens of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, a classic story subtly re-told with contemporary sensibility.

This fluidity of the plot offers room for ambiguity: ambiguity of what's happening, ambiguity of sentiments. Father and daughter have built a universe of their own where they feel perfectly fine, all other relations (the father with the woman who loves him, the daughter with the man whom she eventually will marry) are kept in some sort of a backup, never rejected, never properly treated, just delaying them for later, for that 'you never know'. This while all feel that time never stops, never comes back, never repeats lost occasions.

There is a superb scene that shows all this. Father and daughter, along with their prospects, are going to a concert. The car breaks, it's raining hardly, and they notice a small African restaurant. It's closed, they knock at the door, the owner reopens for them. A drink to get warmed, while the owner prepares some quick dishes, they start to dance, the father with his girlfriend, then with his daughter, the young man with the daughter, the father with the young waitress, each pair is exhaling a sense of intimacy noted with a vague discomfort by the others, while this intimacy is actually filling the whole space, is conquering everybody.

Well, you would ask me what's about with the 35 shots of rum? C'est une vieille histoire (it's an old story) says the father when asked... but you should see the movie for yourselves to understand.

I wish I could pin down Claire Denis' charisma. Watching in a row her 1994 'Je n'ai pas sommeil' and this one, there are some quasi-generic features that help defining what it is about Claire Denis.

All in all I sympathize with the opinion of the viewer who said this is a heartfelt dissection of familial ties. I thought the comment was succinct.

And yet the reviewer who said the new rice boiler was a new start and the funeral at the ending was sufficient occasion for the 35 rhums theory to be 'celebrated' by Lionel, was the one who made me start. I am not at all sure that the new rice boiler stands for new beginnings. And while the end turns around an occasion of mourning, I was under the impression that what is depicted yet never shown was Jo's wedding: her white dress, her mother's necklace, the furtive clad-as-groom appearance of Noe hesitating in front of the two doors, etc, mark for me, although this can be a total mistake, a familiar Denis device: nothing is as it seems, and that means that.

Let me explain a bit my remark. Denis is an economist by formation. What does economy in Denis' film account for, ultimately? And this makes me go back to my preliminary question, that is, What is it about Claire Denis? Oscillating between a somewhat anthropological b-movie, with its clinical, sometimes random like a jotting, drab shots of ordinary time (preparing food, consuming it -note the remarkable scene of three people in a row, in the kitchen, eating standing a silent, quick meal- the repetitive routes of suburban trains etc) and its elated reverse, sudden side with small scale yet condensed and beautiful though emotionally complex rituals (notably the dance in the bar sequence)that seemingly discharges packed-up emotion and pressure from the unexplained portions of raw, elliptical meaning. There may be an overt tone of post-colonial discourse, she may even have detested her studies, it may smell like a b-movie, or, bluntly, like another introvert-and-what-the-fuss-about french film, but I think it demands a very strong hold to tackle with understatement and finesse the issues, the faces, the spaces and the tissues of human economy, rubbing shoulders with the imperceptible and the unsaid.

Aside procedures in the film, and I mean by aside non-cinematic ones, highlight what is going on, more to the spirit of the auteur. Take in the opening credits the way the names of the actors appear: all in three rows, watermarked, and then highlighted, appearing like noon-ghosts; or Tindersticks' score: in the beginning the Messian-like onde mazenot throws a note of otherworldliness, only to be dismissed by a almost naive, post-colonial (sic) subdued, carousel music, that weave together at the end in a defying way, as in general the music slides in and out of the film, casually and perplexedly, not frightfully important yet - yet...

nothing is as it seems, weighs down its cliché. And that is that, the tautologies that are offered in the film, like the father's stubborn silence (what a perfect silence!), cannot, in the end be humanized into clichés. A neighbor who is a lover, or was one, a missing, an absent, a dead parent, or an all too present one, centrifugal urges to leave this way of life, because ghosts overpopulate the seemingly tepid urban scenery, a friend and a colleague who leaves his job and encounters death, the encounter of life-as-promise, ties who are untied or untidy, all this is loose and shiny, even in the autumnal Parisian light, and maybe, narratively, they leak out as everyday clichés, the way one takes the train. Unless they drink 35 rhums.