Out of Frame: 35 Shots of Rum
Few directors are as adept at doing so much with so little as Claire Denis. She proves it once again with her latest, 35 Shots of Rum, a film that, instead of going from beginning to end, starts somewhere in the middle, and ends just a little farther down the line. Denis recognizes that the stories of our lives rarely have definitive starts and finishes – apart from birth and death – and constructs her narrative accordingly.
The director's own starting point was Yasujirō Ozu's 1949 film, Late Spring, though it's so loosely based on that film that it can barely be called an adaptation. Both films involve middle-aged widowers living with their adult daughters, but the direction in which Denis takes the material from there is entirely her own.
The movie's setting is within a middle class black neighborhood in Paris, a community not really shown too often in mainstream cinema, but one familiar to the director, who spent much of her childhood growing up in French colonial Africa. The father, Lionel (played with a quiet yet gentle intensity by Alex Descas), is a train conductor edging toward retirement age. His daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop) is a university student who works in a record store, and who has a somewhat undefined relationship with Noé (Grégoire Colin), the wanderlust-prone young man who lives upstairs. She's not the only one with romantic entanglements in the building: Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), a cab driver who also lives in the complex, is an ex of Lionel's, and still harbors feelings for him.
Denis allows these relationships, familial and romantic, current, past, and longed for, to play out in tidy observational scenes made up largely of the silent and wordless interactions of everyday life. We first see Lionel and Joséphine together as she welcomes him home from work and makes dinner for him with their new rice cooker. This simple domestic routine is turned into a beautiful and succinct portrait of their shared life by Denis's long and mostly wordless takes, and her longtime cinematographer Agnès Godard's elegant images.
The film's centerpiece is a masterpiece of well-choreographed dramatic action, which sums up the feelings of each character without a word being spoken. The foursome, while on their way to a concert, is stranded at an African café after their car breaks down in a driving rainstorm. With the Commodores' "Night Shift" blaring on the soundtrack, we watch as Noé dances seductively with Joséphine, who seems less than receptive, while her father looks on disapprovingly. Later, he dances with an employee of the café, and Gabrielle watches, eyes full of sad jealousy.
The scene is breathtaking in the amount of character it conveys with the only barest of gestures and a complete lack of dialogue, and it is indicative of everything that makes this film work so well. Denis sees human interactions with an uncommon clarity of vision. Her great talent, as evident as ever in this, one of her greatest films, is her ability to allow an audience to see those relationships in the same quietly revelatory way she does.
View the trailer.
Directed by Clair Denis.
Starring Alex Descas and Mati Diop.
Running time: 96 minutes.
Not rated.
Opens today at E Street.