Director: Claire Denis
Writers: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau
Photography: Agnes Godard
Music: Tindersticks
Editor: Guy Lecorne
Cast: Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogue, Gregoire Colin, Julieth Mars Toussaint, Adele Ado, Jean-Christophe Folly
I’ve seen a handful or so of pictures by director and cowriter Claire Denis and have to admit they often leave me mystified. That is notably the case with Beau Travail, a much-acclaimed picture I see turning up on all kinds of best-ever lists, though it left me cold. For all its allusive beauty it is ultimately a French Foreign Legion picture with most of the cliches intact, just more gritty and beautiful. Trouble Every Day was an oddly unpleasant vampire show that did not live up to advance billing. On the other hand, I love White Material and its examination of postcolonial Africa, playing it like tense horror. 35 Shots of Rum, by contrast to all the foregoing (she gets around), is set in suburban Paris and far more domestic and meditative, observing bonds of a fractured family and work group and apartment building community as things inevitably shift and change. Time, life, all that.
Lionel (Alex Descas) is a widower in his 50s who works the commuter trains, riding the complexities of the rail lines which we see in hypnotic shots from his view, tangling and disentangling. He lives with his grown daughter, Josephine (Mati Diop), who has an advanced degree in anthropology. It’s unclear when or how her mother, his wife, died but it feels like it’s many years in the past. They still feel her loss, as a road trip to visit her grave late in the picture shows. Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) is a neighbor who drives a cab for a living. She and Lionel have a history and she still has feelings for him, and motherly feelings for Josephine too. Tensions exist between them, but a good deal of sincere affection too. Rounding out the main four in 35 Shots is the brooding, somewhat standoffish and self-mysterious young man Noe (Gregoire Colin), who also lives in the building.
I’ve seen a handful or so of pictures by director and cowriter Claire Denis and have to admit they often leave me mystified. That is notably the case with Beau Travail, a much-acclaimed picture I see turning up on all kinds of best-ever lists, though it left me cold. For all its allusive beauty it is ultimately a French Foreign Legion picture with most of the cliches intact, just more gritty and beautiful. Trouble Every Day was an oddly unpleasant vampire show that did not live up to advance billing. On the other hand, I love White Material and its examination of postcolonial Africa, playing it like tense horror. 35 Shots of Rum, by contrast to all the foregoing (she gets around), is set in suburban Paris and far more domestic and meditative, observing bonds of a fractured family and work group and apartment building community as things inevitably shift and change. Time, life, all that.
Lionel (Alex Descas) is a widower in his 50s who works the commuter trains, riding the complexities of the rail lines which we see in hypnotic shots from his view, tangling and disentangling. He lives with his grown daughter, Josephine (Mati Diop), who has an advanced degree in anthropology. It’s unclear when or how her mother, his wife, died but it feels like it’s many years in the past. They still feel her loss, as a road trip to visit her grave late in the picture shows. Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) is a neighbor who drives a cab for a living. She and Lionel have a history and she still has feelings for him, and motherly feelings for Josephine too. Tensions exist between them, but a good deal of sincere affection too. Rounding out the main four in 35 Shots is the brooding, somewhat standoffish and self-mysterious young man Noe (Gregoire Colin), who also lives in the building.
It is all, as usual with Denis, somewhat oblique and sidelong. The conflicts, such as they are, are mild on the surface but deep, proceeding somewhat existentially from the terms of life—growing, changing, aging, suddenly leaving things behind. Lionel and Josephine have already experienced death and change, coming out of it with a deep bond. But they know change when they see it coming again, however sad it might make them. As we are introduced, in a swirling kind of way, to these characters and their relationships, the main action begins to focus on a decision by the four to go out and see a concert. They’ve been shut in too much too long, they decide, a night out would do them good. Et cetera. But the car breaks down on the way, and there’s a rainstorm. They are soaked and then abandoned when they finally arrange for a tow-truck to take the car somewhere to be repaired.
They head for a nearby bar and begin a night of mellow carousing in dark amber light. They drink. They dance. The glassware clinks. Though there are tensions among them they are relaxed and comfortable. But this is more or less the night, as incidental as it might seem, that Josephine and Noe fall in love. Lionel sees it, or senses it on some level—so does Gabrielle, watching them all. It’s a subtle, compact scene, with a lot going on.
Denis’s eye for composition and use of the camera along with the flowing staccato editing by Guy Lecorne bring the story to us on its own terms. Even when it’s hard to sort out what’s going on—more so in the early going—it’s a pleasure to look at, with the colors, shapes, motion, and overlays. Similarly, using the alt-rock stylings of the UK Tindersticks for the score brings an unexpected but approximately perfect element in as well.
Still, I am somewhere only slightly north of meh on 35 Shots of Rum and more generally perhaps on Denis herself. I’m not looking for a Hallmark channel weeper but sometimes I feel like she holds back a little too much for me. The main story here of Lionel and Josephine and Josephine inevitably leaving the nest has some powerful antecedents in, for example, some of the pictures of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu such as Late Spring, which indeed Denis has noted as a primary influence on 35 Shots. In Late Spring the tension between the widower father and daughter is more interesting. The daughter does not want to leave and plans not to. It is the father who must insist she find a husband, even knowing it will leave him alone.
The story in 35 Shots of Rum is more straightforward and lacks that poignancy. Josephine is devoted to Lionel but finding a partner changes that, naturally. Lionel does not resist it. He sees what is happening. At the wedding, where he downs 35 shots of rum in some tradition I did not understand, it’s impossible to read his drunkenness. It looks like joy but feels like melancholy.
They head for a nearby bar and begin a night of mellow carousing in dark amber light. They drink. They dance. The glassware clinks. Though there are tensions among them they are relaxed and comfortable. But this is more or less the night, as incidental as it might seem, that Josephine and Noe fall in love. Lionel sees it, or senses it on some level—so does Gabrielle, watching them all. It’s a subtle, compact scene, with a lot going on.
Denis’s eye for composition and use of the camera along with the flowing staccato editing by Guy Lecorne bring the story to us on its own terms. Even when it’s hard to sort out what’s going on—more so in the early going—it’s a pleasure to look at, with the colors, shapes, motion, and overlays. Similarly, using the alt-rock stylings of the UK Tindersticks for the score brings an unexpected but approximately perfect element in as well.
Still, I am somewhere only slightly north of meh on 35 Shots of Rum and more generally perhaps on Denis herself. I’m not looking for a Hallmark channel weeper but sometimes I feel like she holds back a little too much for me. The main story here of Lionel and Josephine and Josephine inevitably leaving the nest has some powerful antecedents in, for example, some of the pictures of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu such as Late Spring, which indeed Denis has noted as a primary influence on 35 Shots. In Late Spring the tension between the widower father and daughter is more interesting. The daughter does not want to leave and plans not to. It is the father who must insist she find a husband, even knowing it will leave him alone.
The story in 35 Shots of Rum is more straightforward and lacks that poignancy. Josephine is devoted to Lionel but finding a partner changes that, naturally. Lionel does not resist it. He sees what is happening. At the wedding, where he downs 35 shots of rum in some tradition I did not understand, it’s impossible to read his drunkenness. It looks like joy but feels like melancholy.
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