Claire Denis upends two overused household tropes with her most elegiac feature, 35 Shots of Rum, with her acute eye for humane detail. First, she avoids the depiction of domestic spaces as consumerist prisons that place traps on everyone (especially women) with nothing but everyday products that mask existential despair. Early in the film, Josephine (Mati Diop), a college student living with her father Lionel (Alex Descas), brings home a new rice cooker, and the oblong, plastic device becomes the focal point of the initial scenes in their apartment. Close-ups on objects like it, a washing machine, and a radio do not dehumanize the flat’s residents, but instead are rendered to show what gives them comfort and pleasure.
Second, the film sidesteps the tendency to imply that especially close familial ties are inherently incestuous. This is impressive given that Denis herself is one of the great erotic and provocative filmmakers of our time, capable of wringing sexual frisson from something as minuscule as wind rippling a shirt. But she crucially does not disrespect her characters’ love and closeness, even if she does dig into their relationship to pinpoint the untenability of their mutual isolation.
Indebted to Late Spring, Ozu Yasujiro’s own chronicle of a daughter’s unfailing loyalty to her lonely father, 35 Shots exudes the late Japanese filmmaker’s economic style in a number of static master shots that map the geography of apartments and the interlocked rails of Lionel’s work as a subway conductor. For the most part, however, Denis propels the film with her gestural style. She employs shifting POV shots that take in people and places with glances, especially in tacit exchanges between Josephine and some of the boys who catch her eye, like classmate Ruben (Jean-Christophe Folly) and brooding neighbor Noé (Grégoire Colin). If the male gaze ogles, Denis’s camera flirts instead, looking in someone’s direction just long enough for them to notice before redirecting attention elsewhere, which wryly teases the objects of the characters’ affections. Agnès Godard’s tactile cinematography highlights the beauty of a cigarette end burning against twilight, as well as the way that a little bob of the camera in a POV shot can give away the seer’s excitement.
The abstract, aesthetic approach is prioritized in place of an explicit plot by gradually building a story out of context—be it Lionel and Josephine growing up in ethnic, immigrant-descended communities or the history merely suggested between Lionel and effervescent cab driver Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué). Speech is kept to a minimum, but no one can miss the meaning of Lionel attending the retirement party of his friend, who regards the life milestone with no uncertain regret, or of the father bristling at his daughter’s growing pains while watching her with boys. Even so, the lack of narrative drive allows such ostensibly obvious, pointed moments to take on shades of ambiguity and ambivalence, confronting Lionel and Josephine with the unstoppable progression of time and forcing them to make some kind of peace with it.
Numerous scenes burn into the mind, including major events like suicide and marriage, but the fullest expression of the film’s gentle evocation of time comes when Gabrielle’s car breaks down in a rainstorm as she drives Lionel, Jo and Noé to a concert. While waiting at a local bar, they dance to music playing on the jukebox, the initial daddy-daughter pairing broken up when Noé cuts in to the strains of the Commodores’ “Night Shift.” Swaying against a wall of dark seafoam, Jo and Noé are lit with Caravaggio-esque chiaroscuro that turns everything around them into an irrelevant void as they sink into each other before breaking away in embarrassment at sharing such a connection in public. Lionel watches this silently, and he even pulls in a young server to dance with him to displace his sudden resentment, but he also flashes an odd smile as he hands off Jo to Noé, as he if knows in this moment that this is his future, if not with Noé than with some other man. The characters’ jagged arcs intersect in this sequence, not only Lionel’s overprotectiveness but also Gabrielle’s frustrated desire and the youths’ emotional reticence and inexperience. And if the scene does not suggest any easy path forward for reconciling these interlinked strands, it nonetheless suggests some form of equilibrium is possible. Denis specializes in discomfiting, politically charged films that peel back people’s basest instincts, but 35 Shots of Rum belongs with her US Go Home and Vendredi soir as proof that an understanding and love for humanity underpins even her most nihilistic work.
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