35 rhums

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.

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 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?

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.

The quiet Lionel (played by the cool Alex Descas) lives with his grown up daughter Joséphine (newcomer Mati Diop) in a comfortable, albeit somewhat sterile, grey, contemporary apartment in a Parisian suburb. Life has unfortunately taken away Lionel's wife, and left the two-person family in a state of tranquil solitude, where the father and daughter lean on each other in the big wide world. This outside world is there, as their entourage, but they keep it at bay. Lionel knows they can not continue living like that indefinitely, and one day he will have to let his daughter go, to live her own life, but silently he hopes that that day will be far off. When their upstairs neighbour Noé, who has always been there, announces that he will leave, Joséphine gets angry. It is at that moment that she too realises that the world around her can not be forever frozen. It is time to look ahead.

The small family is running on a borrowed time, but happy to be together while they still can. They are compared to Gabrielle, the family friend, who lives in hope and the afore mentioned neighbour Noé, who lives, disorientated, in painful past of his parents' death. Both of them cling to Lionel and Joséphine for their stability, for the calm love they share. As a viewer, you can not help but feel that Lionel "should" be living with Gabrielle and Joséphine with Noé, as that would be a more natural state than a grown-up girl living with her father. But of course, there are no rules to who who should be living with who. Or are there? When Lionel and Joséphine look to their future, what do they see? This in between state, at the end of the close-knit family life and the starting of your own, is the playing field of the film. 35 Rhums, is a very slow movie with a close attention to detail, reminiscent of Claire Denis' Vendredi Soir. We see what is going on, through the actions of the characters, leaving very little to be said. The consequence of such an approach is that you have to slow down the pace, to allow the audience time to take in those details. There lies the risk, and although I was taken in by characters, the "normal" gestures or running of the train through the urban landscape scenes are a little too customary to warrant such an exposure. Whether or not this will bother you is hard to judge, but you will need to be a bit indulgent.

Racially, the movie is quite a curiosity. Lionel is black and his wife was white so their daughter, evidently, is métis. So far all is normal. Joséphine's love interest and upstairs neighbour Noé is white. The family friend Gabrielle looks Caribbean. Still fine. Then we get to see his colleagues at the railways, the SNCF, and they are all black! Is there an SNCF line which hires only staff of African or Caribbean descent? Not very likely. And then there is Joséphine's university: the professor and all the students are black! Not even at the university of Martinique, where most people are black, is it an easy feat to write yourself in for a course where not a single white or other raced student has written himself in. What is the point of this bizarre image? Even if they were part of some community (e.g. Caribbean), then that would make more sense showing it in opposition to another French community (say mainstream or Chinese) rather then an artificial submersion. But they are not part of a subculture (no more than their own individuality) nor are the SNCF colleagues or the students. It is a strange touch which is unrealistic and seemingly without purpose.

Overall 35 Rhums is a carefully crafted film well worth its time, despite its weaknesses. Make sure you are not tired when you go it, to be able to take in the rhythm, as you are taken along the tracks in the Parisian behind-the-scenes. Lionel and Joséphine will linger with you long after the lights are back on.