35 Doses de 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?