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.