35 Shots of Rum

35 Shots of Rum

100 Minutes






A family drama about a makeshift family, Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum operates at the bare fringes of human experience, places where responsibility fades away and obsolescence takes hold. This motif, neatly summarized by a redundant rice cooker, is at the core of a careful study of domestic life, fittingly dovetailing with its setting, in the neglected working-class neighborhoods that ring the outer reaches of Paris.

This side of the city, with few - if any - white faces on display, is one that's rarely seen, especially in a cinematic sense. But it's home to the widowed Lionel (Alex Descas) and his daughter Josephine (Mati Diop), a tight pair whose co-dependency, as she enters her twenties, is clearly nearing its end. Their group is rounded out by two neighbors: Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), a former lover of Lionel and spurned maternal figure, and Noé (Grégoire Colin), who lives in his dead parents' former apartment and has an undefined history with Josephine. It's a fragile unit, one that seems poised to give way at any time, and Denis pulls the scant plot points of her story from its brittle creaking.

The issue of the dreary immigrant setting, where outsiders cluster together in flatly-colored apartment blocks, is never directly approached, but its ambiance informs the entire tone of the film. Josephine, a child of mixed African and German heritage, is a student in the sociology department of an unnamed university, another immigrant-dominated arena, where third-world debt is debated and flash fires of simmering anger spurt up again and again. Lionel and his co-workers are a tight-knit crew, men and women of various ages whose bar excursions recall travelers huddling around a fire.

All of these characters possess a distinct fear of uselessness, a state which seems likely for many of them. The example of Lionel's co-worker René - who enters retirement with a mix of anguish and trepidation - is not a happy one, although this is less a cynical statement than one about the danger of being alone. Lionel's own conflict, a phobia of obsolescence versus wanting the best for his daughter, remains implicit, like most of the conflicts here, hinted at in veiled comments about not wanting to be a burden. Indicative of Denis' careful methods, these complicated feelings manifest themselves briefly and mundanely in a fight over laundry.

Denis' stated muse here is Ozu, an influence that is present in theme if not in style, with a skeleton plot and the prevailing concern with family obligation. There are also trains, which made requisite appearances in the Japanese master's films, and here are present by repeated motif of unspooling track, lines coupling and uncoupling, seen from Lionel's eyes as a conductor on the Metro.

This visual pattern reads as overly direct symbolism, invoking the dividing paths of the characters' relationships, but it's a small hitch that's easily forgotten. The stolidity of these people, easily read as woodenness, is instead a hint at underlying tension. Denis operates, as in her best work, in a magnified mode of careful inspection; what initially appears as inaction is actually dramatic movement in slow motion, a process conveyed through action as often as words. Set pieces like a beautifully rendered dance and the film's ambiguous closing scene, where the mystery of the titular feat of drinking is revealed, further the plot without didacticism, resulting in a movie that, like its lead actors, expresses much while saying little.

by Jesse Cataldo