CLAIRE DENIS’ 35 Shots of Rum investigates a small world of the sidelined, the elsewhere. It takes place in an unlovely Parisian suburb of high-rises. Yet the gifted cinematographer Agnès Godard makes even this world startling. One lady, gazing out of her apartment at night, looks into abstract field of square windows across the street; some iodine-reddish, some radiant with blue TV light. Denis studies black faces reflected in black glass; she puts a touch of grace even into the silent changing of the shifts in a locker room.
The film concerns a series of off-again on-again relationships in a group of Afro-French people of the ring suburbs. The central one is the love of a daughter and a father, as close and yet as isolated as Prospero and Miranda. Lionel (Alex Descas) is a train conductor on the RER, the Parisian equivalent to BART. When not working his long hours, Lionel is doted on by his grown daughter, Josephine (Mati Diop). She’s a college student who works nights at a Virgin Records store. This couple has the kind of closeness that challenges an audience: What’s really going on with them? Is it devotion or something unnatural? The slippery Denis gives us no solid evidence. There are embraces that might (or might not) go farther, but Denis cuts away. “We do what we want to,” says Josephine to her father. This could just mean that they don’t have to face the outside world if they don’t feel like it. Or?
The reverse angle on the story doesn’t solve the mystery. Watching Lionel and Josephine closely is Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), a spiky, lonely female taxi driver who lives in their building. Once upon a time, Gabrielle had some kind of affair with the train conductor; it’s over, and yet she can’t declare it over. And Josephine has a kind of interest in another person in the building—Noé (Grégoire Colin), a diffident young man with one foot out the door.
The dead-end relationships are finally catalyzed during an impromptu late-night party at a cafe. It’s a party that happens by accident, while the father and the daughter, and their two sort-of lovers, are heading out for a concert. Here, 35 Shots of Rum slips language and continues its storytelling through a series of dances—Gabrielle getting a chance at last to hold Lionel for a minute on the dance floor before he turns his attentions elsewhere. As a study of a solitary working man, there are passages in 35 Shots of Rum that are worthy of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. But the ménages are far more tense and braided than in Burnett’s masterpiece; and the flute and electronic keyboard score by the band Tindersticks gilds this restrained exercise in sorrow and tendresse. Mysteriously, trains frame the shots; again we join Lionel on his wordless, subterranean voyages; 35 Shots of Rum does for trains what L’atalante did for barges.
Local theaters, show times and tickets at MovieTimes.com.
35 SHOTS OF RUM (Unrated; 99 min.), directed by Claire Denis, written by Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau, photographed by Agnès Godard and starring Alex Descas and Mati Diop, opens Jan. 22 at Camera 3 in San Jose.
