I was looking for another film by this filmmaker, promised to two readers. Unable to find it, I turned to this. I count myself lucky. It's potent stuff if you can place yourself inside. One possible way is to note the Ozu influence. Most comments mention it. It's in the quiet family life between widowed father and his only daughter, in the dispassionate eye that gently embraces rhythms, in the lack of ego and hurt among the participants. He a train driver, attuned to a calm linear life that he controls, she a sociologist student, opening up to exploring and conceptualizing her ideas about things. This is all a great entry, Denis films warmth, equanimity, assurance in simply the presence of two people together. There's no dissatisfaction in the routine, no loneliness in the solitude. Denis has adopted Zen indirectly via cinematic Ozu, this character is not apparent in another of her films I've seen, which only affirms that she's open and agile in her work, refusing to settle.That's all fine in itself, I'll have this in my home over existential rumination every time, but Ozu is a bit more than tender tea in composed form. He begins with a rhythm that sets the spatiotemporal mechanism, and only after we have acquired presence does he introduce the dramatic event, usually a single one, usually marriage. The deeper thrust is that we'll go around that bend with more clarity than usual, registering transition in a cosmic way. A Japanese girl deciding on marriage was deciding on her future life after all; this needs to settle as deeply in us.This is all about cosmic transition, albeit in even softer strokes. A larger family has been introduced in between, another woman who has feelings for the widower, a boy who has feelings for the girl. They all live in the same building. There's a lovely spatial fabric that brings them together, for instance the boy coming up the stairs pauses in the hall and intently stares at the girl's door, the intensity is that he's not just looking at a piece of wood but through that, intently as if to part the image, into the space of a possible life beyond. So this isn't about just rhythm and composed space. It's about the neighbor woman smoking at her window hoping to see the man but not being sure this is it.It all comes together in a marvelous scene of dancing in a small neighborhood bar, a crank has been thrown in their concert plans for the evening, their car that breaks down, so life spontaneously resumes on the spot to figure itself out. The deeper thrust is that they all have to go on. The father has to let his daughter go, the girl has to move on from the family nest, the boy has to come to terms that he might have to move on alone, the neighbor woman move on without making her feelings known. A train colleague receives his pension as the film starts, he also has to move on but can't envision another life ahead; sure enough he's discovered near the end dead on the tracks by the father.The game with 35 shots is another entry; they do it, the father muses in a bar, to mark something that only happens once, life in a broader sense.The ending poses a conundrum. You'll probably have a sense of what Denis is trying to accomplish by that point. She has removed the one thing that significantly held Ozu back, explaining from the outside. So she's looking to embody the transition that is more than an event. Indirectly this brings her in line with every other filmmaker currently worth knowing in the attempt to create a new visual logic for becoming conscious. Denis is uniquely equipped in having seen Tarkovsky at work. So the film becomes muddled, crispness must go at that point. The whole idea is that they are both in the end still unsure about it, this is anchored in the nervous image of the boy in the hall. Did she do it?

"35 Shots of Rum" opens on Lionel, a black African immigrant who spends long hours driving a train across France. Haggard and tired he returns to his tiny apartment, which he shares with daughter Josephine. "Don't feel I need looking after," he tells her, but it's a lie. They're lonesome without each another. Director Claire Denis then lingers on scenes of unusually tender father/daughter intimacy, such that for a while we think the duo may be lovers. But their relationship is more complex; they want to be free of each other but are wary of cutting ties.Denis' films have long focused on France's former colonies ("Chocolat", "Beau Travail", "White Material" etc). The political contradictions, psychological pressures and after-effects of this colonial legacy are the targets of "35 Shots of Rum, but aside from one scene, in which Josephine and her classmates debate colonialism, resistance, globalisation and name-drop philosopher Frantz Fanon and economist Joseph Stiglitz, such "big issues" remain in the background. Instead, the film's themes are approached subtly. And so we see first generation immigrants relegated to public sector work, a father and daughter who yearn to move on but feel weighed down by familial, historical and past ties, and characters who are either taxi drivers or train conductors, all things transient, always moving, but going nowhere and unable to move on. A sense of alienation blankets the film, characters trapped in cubicles, cars, carts and carriages, sealed mournfully in the aural cocoons afforded by Ipods, or unable to break free of class and racial straitjackets. Josephine – herself both black-and-white, her mother German - strikes up a relationship with a wealthy French boy called Noe, but their love is an uneasy one. They yearn for one another, but she won't let it happen. Her eyes drift to an African student instead. Gabrielle, another neighbour, likewise mourns the death of her relationship with Lionel. The quartet form the modern family, forever splintered. Meanwhile, no one notices the death of the now unemployed Rene, a co-worker whom Lionel runs over with his train. Rene's representative of a marginalised underclass, discarded and replaced like so much machinery."Rum" homages Yasujiro Ozu's "Late Spring", a film in which a father urges his daughter to leave his side and pursue marriage. In Denis' hands, the daughter's inability to leave is symbolic of a larger form of both cultural division and shaky assimilation. Beyond this, Denis mimics Ozu's minimalist style, gentle pace and elliptical narrative, but her aesthetic is more sensual, more ethereal, more resemblant of Hou Hsio-hsien (particularly "Cafe Lumiere"). Denis' train-eye shots also echo Jean Renoir's "La bete humaine", but the overt horrors of Renoir's work become a more muted, more accepted form of benign violence in her hands. See the films of Olivier Assayas (particularly "Summer Hours"), another French director with similar concerns.Though the film is set in France, few of "Rum's" characters are white, exemplifying the changes which have rocketed across the European landscape in recent decades. French itself is now spoken mostly by people who aren't French, more than 50 percent of whom are immigrants from Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, and who have settled in France and brought their native cultures with them. What, Denis asks, does French culture signify in a world in which only sixty five million of 200 million French speakers are actually French? Of course culture in general has become increasingly unfixed, unstable, fragmentary and elective. Global capitalism sells distinction and individuality as fast as it destroys the same. In response, groups fight desperately to cling to their roots. In Canada the Quebecers tried outlawing signs and other public expressions in anything but French. Basque separatists have been murdering Spaniards in the name of political, linguistic and cultural independence, just as Franco imprisoned anyone who spoke Basque or Catalan. In Belgium the split between French and Dutch speakers has divided the country for ages. So what Denis captures is a world in which financial, commercial, human, cultural and technology flows are faster and more extensive than ever before, resulting in not only widespread alienation, but a counteractive desire to "hold fast" onto what little you have. In France this began in the early 1990s, as debates raged about European integration and the "benefits of multiculturalism", which in reality simply meant the freer movements of capital, goods and people. During this period, France's socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, and conservative president Jacques Chirac, often spoke of the need for alternatives to unregulated markets of goods, money, and people and both demanded more "rules" to govern globalisation. Their words were smokescreens, however, both rampantly liberalising and privatising large sections of the French economy. It's a common tactic: spout traditionally left-wing discourse on the necessity of "controlling market forces", "combating the excesses of liberalism" and "the dangers of unbridled globalisation driven by jungle capitalism", while doing the opposite. Meanwhile, the dynamics of empire has changed. While globalisation reinstates European and American imperialism by allowing First World capitalists quasi-ownership of Third World countries through purchases of strategic government-owned enterprises, the nature of the French economy has itself changed radically. France has since the early 1980s converted to market liberalisation, both as the necessary by-product of European integration and globalisation and as a result of deliberate efforts by policymakers. People like Sarkozy, Chirac and Jospin have sold off more state-owned assets than the previous five governments put together. Whereas fifteen years ago foreign ownership of French firms was only around 10 percent, today over 40 percent of the shares in France are held abroad, and foreigners own more than half of key French companies. These issues are dealt with overtly in other Claire Denis films. With "Rum" she simply presents the fallout. 8.9/10 – Near masterpiece. See "Summer Hours".

The quiet Lionel (played by the cool Alex Descas) lives with his grown up daughter Joséphine (newcomer Mati Diop) in a comfortable, albeit somewhat sterile, grey, contemporary apartment in a Parisian suburb. Life has unfortunately taken away Lionel's wife, and left the two-person family in a state of tranquil solitude, where the father and daughter lean on each other in the big wide world. This outside world is there, as their entourage, but they keep it at bay. Lionel knows they can not continue living like that indefinitely, and one day he will have to let his daughter go, to live her own life, but silently he hopes that that day will be far off. When their upstairs neighbour Noé, who has always been there, announces that he will leave, Joséphine gets angry. It is at that moment that she too realises that the world around her can not be forever frozen. It is time to look ahead.The small family is running on a borrowed time, but happy to be together while they still can. They are compared to Gabrielle, the family friend, who lives in hope and the afore mentioned neighbour Noé, who lives, disorientated, in painful past of his parents' death. Both of them cling to Lionel and Joséphine for their stability, for the calm love they share. As a viewer, you can not help but feel that Lionel "should" be living with Gabrielle and Joséphine with Noé, as that would be a more natural state than a grown-up girl living with her father. But of course, there are no rules to who who should be living with who. Or are there? When Lionel and Joséphine look to their future, what do they see? This in between state, at the end of the close-knit family life and the starting of your own, is the playing field of the film. 35 Rhums, is a very slow movie with a close attention to detail, reminiscent of Claire Denis' Vendredi Soir. We see what is going on, through the actions of the characters, leaving very little to be said. The consequence of such an approach is that you have to slow down the pace, to allow the audience time to take in those details. There lies the risk, and although I was taken in by characters, the "normal" gestures or running of the train through the urban landscape scenes are a little too customary to warrant such an exposure. Whether or not this will bother you is hard to judge, but you will need to be a bit indulgent.Racially, the movie is quite a curiosity. Lionel is black and his wife was white so their daughter, evidently, is métis. So far all is normal. Joséphine's love interest and upstairs neighbour Noé is white. The family friend Gabrielle looks Caribbean. Still fine. Then we get to see his colleagues at the railways, the SNCF, and they are all black! Is there an SNCF line which hires only staff of African or Caribbean descent? Not very likely. And then there is Joséphine's university: the professor and all the students are black! Not even at the university of Martinique, where most people are black, is it an easy feat to write yourself in for a course where not a single white or other raced student has written himself in. What is the point of this bizarre image? Even if they were part of some community (e.g. Caribbean), then that would make more sense showing it in opposition to another French community (say mainstream or Chinese) rather then an artificial submersion. But they are not part of a subculture (no more than their own individuality) nor are the SNCF colleagues or the students. It is a strange touch which is unrealistic and seemingly without purpose.Overall 35 Rhums is a carefully crafted film well worth its time, despite its weaknesses. Make sure you are not tired when you go it, to be able to take in the rhythm, as you are taken along the tracks in the Parisian behind-the-scenes. Lionel and Joséphine will linger with you long after the lights are back on.

Alex Descas ('Late August, Early September,' 'Boarding Gate') stars with Denis perennial favorite the ('Variety'says) "sexy, soulful" Grégoire Colin; plus Mati Diop, Nicole Dogue, and Jean-Christophe Folly in a deceptively simple-seeming film about a group of apartment neighbors and coworkers, mostly black. Lionel (Descas), an RER train conductor, has raised his daughter Josephine (Diop) alone since she was a little girl. She's grown up now, a student at the faculty of anthropology who works in a music shop. They live together as a couple, each caring more for the other than for anybody else but increasingly realizing this doesn't make sense any more. Neighbor and ex-girlfriend Gabrielle (Dogue) still evidently hankers after Lionel. Noé (Colin), also down the hall, lives in the cluttered apartment of his deceased parents, goes on long rips, and hankers after Jo. They're all stuck. And all very close to each other.The engines of the plot are the retirement of one of Lionel's longtime coworkers and friends; a party; a missed concert; a bad storm; a funeral; and the death of Noé's 17-year-old cat.Denis' special touch shows in her handling of family intimacy, the way a routine event can suddenly shift into a life-changing moment. The apartment block seems ordinary and mundane but the relationships resonate from the first shots. A car that breaks down in the rain leads to a party in a closed bar with music that lights up the theater. A long stare into a woman's eyes speaks volumes. A pair are jogging on a wet day and the guy jumps in the river on a whim. His cat dies and Noé decides to move to Gabon. And an extra rice cooker taken out of its box means a new start. Almost everything is communicated with faces and very little exposition or dialogue.It's interesting how the chameleon Grégoire Colin blends in with the black people. His own face seems stained and tawny, his look gypsy-like and sly. He slips in and out of some of Denis' films almost casually, seemingly unnecessary yet essential, mysterious yet making them more real. Here he reappears at the end almost phantom-like, after he seemed to have left. Music, rain, trains, and a motorcycle become symbols of change.After the group has been established, especially the intimacy between Lionel and Jo, comes the retirement of fellow trainman René (Julieth Mars Toussaint), which leads to the "35 rum shots" evening--but Lionel stops short, saying the occasion doesn't warrant going to the whole 35. René is sad and lost without his work to define him. He speaks grimly of living to 100, but will come to a tragic end after appearing alone at a bar the group frequents and taking a sad ride in an RER engine car with Lionel.Then comes the concert, the car breakdown, and the impromptu, and wonderful, party in the bar the group persuades the owners to reopen. There are jealousies--Lionel's disapproval of Noé's intimate dancing with Jo; Gabrielle's of Lionel's dancing with the beautiful café owner (Adele Ado); but the warmth of the group is confirmed in this subtle, intense sequence.Sequences in which Jo disputes socio-political issues and Franz Fanon in a university class and is approached by fellow student Ruben (Jean-Christophe Folly) at the music shop (he invites her too late to the concert and gives her a romantic bouquet with a note) are a bit more artificial and expository but help show Jo'e developing life away from her father. There's also a trip to Germany that shows who Lionel's wife (and Jo's mother) was. But this is explanation that only shows us how much we don't know.Denis mostly, as usual, makes us do the work, but the job isn't as tricky or complicated as in her previous (and remarkable) 'The Intruder.' This film seems like the essence of what good contemporary French film-making is about: the subtle surface, the hidden depths behind ordinary appearances, the shifting amber lights in soft dawns and sunsets by Denis' consummate DP Agnes Godard; the rain, the warm café. I'm indebted to the review by 'Variety's' Jay Weisberg for pointing out that the original music is by the Tindersticks, and the enveloping song in the bar is the Commodores' "Nightshift"; and he also points wisely to the importance of Judy Shrewsbury's costume designs, which are notably lovely in the case of Adel Ado's dark red dress in the bar and the white sheath-like one worn by Mati Diop for a funeral--the occasion when Lionel finally drinks the 35 shots of rum.'35 Shots of Rum'/'35 Rhums' opens in Paris February 19, 2009; part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, New York, March 2009. Raves from some of the French print sources that count most: 'Libération,' 'Le Monde,' 'Le Point,' 'Cahiers du Cinéma,' 'Les Inrockuptibles.'