35 Shots of Rum English movie
Cast And Crew
Starring: Djedje Apali, Adele Ado, Ingrid Caven, Nicole Dogue, Alex Descas
Director: Claire Denis
Producer: Claudia Steffen, Christoph Friedel, Bruno Pesery
Photographer * Agnès Godard
Composer * Tindersticks
Screen Writer * Claire Denis * Jean-Pol Fargeau
Genres: Art/Foreign, Drama and Kids/Family
Running Time: 1 hr. 40 min.
Release Date: September 16th, 2009 (limited)
Screenwriter: Jean-pol Fargeau, Claire Denis
Reviews
Few directors currently at work in France are as intriguing or mercurial as Claire Denis. Her extraordinary 1999 film Beau Travail invested the harsh reality of life in the French Foreign Legion with the formal grace of performance art. Trouble Every Day from 2001 was a perplexing exercise in arthouse horror which explored the erotic potential of cannibalism. 35 Shots Of Rum returns Denis to the sort of intimate yet impressionistic drama which marked her debut Chocolat from 1988, and her tender 2004 film about sexual longing, Vendredi Soir. Once again she undertakes a lyrical journey through the unvisited corners of the human heart, and once again audiences are asked to provide their own map.
Opening with a long, long sequence shot from the cab of a juddering commuter train as it winds its way through the Parisian suburbs, 35 Shots is a film in which the characters - like the story itself - creep imperceptibly towards a destination which we in the audience never quite see. Train-driver and single father Lionel (Alex Descas) and his student daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop) live together in cosy domestic contentment. So cosy in fact, that it's a while before the precise nature of their relationship becomes clear. Upstairs from their apartment lives a restless young guy called Noé (Grégoire Colin), for whom Joséphine has a bit of a thing. Along the corridor is cab-driver Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), who has clearly carried a torch for Lionel for years. The sense, felt with varying degrees of urgency by all four, is that change - of the unremarkable but inevitable sort by which most of our lives evolve - is coming on down the line.
As with much of Denis' work, 35 Shots gives the impression of easy-rolling naturalism but in fact the film, which by the director's admission owes much to Japan's quiet chronicler of domestic anguish Yasujiro Ozu, is instilled with a carefully maintained air of unreality. An impromptu party in a late night café evolves into a dream-like dance sequence as the foursome smooch along to The Commodores. It's a moment which articulates the unspoken impulses crackling between them almost as effectively as the brilliantly bizarre disco finale which brought Beau Travail to such a strange yet haunting close. Denis has refined a form of filmmaking grounded in allusion and suggestion in which, like those old Magic Eye puzzles, you need to squint and stop looking for meaning, in order for the meaning to come into view.
French director Claire Denis’s marvellous latest feature is a portrait of the close relationship between widowed Parisian train driver Lionel (Alex Descas) and his affectionate student daughter, Joséphine (Mati Diop). Critics have welcomed it as both her warmest movie and, with its quiet observation of small ritual, her most affirmative and Ozu-esque. But though it’s true that ‘35 Shots’ demonstrates an extraordinary reflective ease and contains possibly more hugs and smiles than Denis’s entire oeuvre to date, that is not to say it is a film free of tribulations, tensions and taboos.
The story is simple, a collection of scenes from the life of this small family who live in a flat in the Rue de la Guadeloupe, a little nest where Lionel escapes from the loneliness of his cab and the memory of his losses, and from which Joséphine, inhibited from fullly developing her relationships with her neighbours, surrogate ‘mother’ Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) and ‘suitor’ Noé (Grégoire Colin), must soon fly.
From this, Denis magically evokes a liberal meditation on family, harmony, loyalty and belonging and their corollaries – loss, transgression, loneliness and separation – and achieves a sweet unity, not least through a beautifully discreet use of symbols, motifs and metaphors. Thus as cinematographer Agnès Godard’s artful visual correspondences (an RER train and a block of flats shot at night) deepen an understanding of social context, the film’s various vehicles – Lionel’s train thundering into north Paris, his motorbike, the bicycle blocking the hallway – suggest not only specifics of occupation or class, but also journeys of different speeds. The film’s extraordinary economy is typified by a lovely, spontaneous café scene where the principles dance to the Commodores’ ‘Nightshift’, a mini-ballet touchingly evocative of their separate feelings, relationships and destinies.
35 Shots of Rum" - Synopsis
In a Paris suburb, a widowed metro conductor, approaching retirement, lives with his beautiful grown daughter, a college student - the object of a neighbor's romantic interest. The man's former girlfriend also lives in their building and continues to play a role in their closely-knit lives.
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