Coming soon on the heels of those twin brutalities, Trouble Every Day (2001) and The Intruder (2004), 35 Shots of Rum (2008) would seem to be a radical departure for director Claire Denis, a warm, intimate, minor key domestic drama which borrows much of its internal plot mechanics from Yasujirō Ozu’s masterful Late Spring (1949). Not so, says Denis, in an interview with British film critic Jonathan Romney: “I changed nothing. I just tried to convey another story. But it’s the same me and I believe in the same things. Minor key, major key – all these things might be useful for music, but they have nothing to do with cinema. When making a film, the scale doesn’t matter. What matters is the way the film addresses people, the way it matters to them. For me, there is no key. It’s the same process.”
And what a fascinating process it is. What is perhaps most remarkable about Claire Denis’ filmography to date is how varied her subject matter is and yet how cohesive it all manages to appear when taken as a whole. Without having an instantly recognizable visual style, à la Robert Bresson or Wes Anderson, for example, and without having a consistent area of focus like the aforementioned Ozu, Denis nevertheless effortlessly imbues her work with a hard-to-pin-down flavor that is quintessentially her own. There is something about the rigor with which she approaches her material, the precision with which she pares back all but the essential, until even the seemingly extraneous achieves a level of inevitability. It helps that she often relies on the same pool of actors (Alex Descas, Béatrice Dalle, Grégoire Colin, et al.) and artistic collaborators (co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau, cinematographer Agnès Godard, music by Tindersticks), but it is more than a mere consistency of screen credits that allows her body of work to cohere.
Denis tends to utilize a small number of thematic motifs in her films, perhaps chief among them the notion of boundary – that real or imagined line of demarcation that separates what is “inside” from what is “outside.” Whether it be the historical gulf that separates the colonized from the colonizer, the perpetual outsider status of the immigrant, the eternal war between the sexes or the literal boundary of the body itself, the characters in a Claire Denis film are frequently aching to transcend, to penetrate, intrude, transgress, or otherwise dissolve the boundaries that separate, that alienate themselves from themselves, from others, from whatever it is that they believe will make them happy. She will frequently employ shots of characters looking off into the distance, out of windows, across vast distances, gazing at each other surreptitiously, attempting through force of will or desire to obliterate what separates and to achieve some semblance of unity.
In 35 Shots of Rum, those outsiders are three in number, although two predominate. These are Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué), a nostalgic and fiercely romantic middle-aged taxi driver and Noé (Grégoire Colin), a brooding nihilist, a rich kid whose studied nonchalance hides a passion he can’t quite bring himself to extinguish. Both live in an apartment building in suburban Paris (Noé occupies the penthouse suite, while Gabrielle resides in less-opulent surroundings) and both are languishing, orbiting around the tight nuclear family unit of a father and daughter, Lionel (Alex Descas) and Joséphine (Mati Diop).
Joséphine (early-twenties, a university student who works part-time at a record shop) and Lionel (late-forties, a widowed train operator for a commuter rail line) live in seeming domestic bliss in the tight confines of a cramped apartment in the same building as Gabrielle and Noé. The way that Jo smiles when Lionel returns from work, the ease with which they cook and eat dinner together, their casual familiarity and tenderness with one another, leads one at first to assume that they are a romantic couple instead of father and daughter. Jo’s disinclination to leave the family abode and her reluctance to engage in any sort of social life is the internal tension, the potential energy that must be dispersed throughout the film’s (minimal) plot.
Gabrielle, surrogate mother to Joséphine in her early years, after her mother’s death, has waited for decades to be let into the inner circle, to get Lionel to look at her the way that she has always looked at him. And Noé is tethered to Jo, the only reason why he hasn’t left the country for good, but she is unable to see him as an option, not wanting to connect but afraid to let him go, unwilling to break the illusion of perpetual familial stasis. The central scene of the film involves all four main characters as they seek refuge from a storm in the intimate setting of a family-owned café, late one fateful evening. As in many of Denis’ films, a dance scene ensues which reveals so much. Set to the tune of the Commodores’ “Night Shift,” the entire sequence is a tight encapsulation of everything Denis does best – the caressing close-ups of her actors’ faces, their glances worth a thousand words, the crackling energy passing between, leaping past boundaries; the bodies in motion, the joy, the tragedy, the gentle, warmhearted humanity of it all. Set to the perfect song, framed perfectly, lit perfectly, performed and edited perfectly. A miniature masterpiece.
The third of the three outsiders in this story is Ruben (Jean-Christophe Folly), a schoolmate of Jo’s, who fails to attract her romantic attention. He serves mainly as a link between the main plot and a scene set in Joséphine’s sociology class. As the class debates the injustices of the rich countries of the world using the leverage of the IMF and the World Bank to dominate the Global South, reviving all the old colonial programs in capitalist drag, one realizes, while looking around this classroom filled with earnest Black and brown faces, that the entire film thus far has contained no white people, and that this has all been taking place in France of all places, and that this fact suffuses the story, enlarging its significance, imbuing the film with defiance and sadness, comradeship and the creaking weight of history.
The one character in this film who is both insider and outsider is René (Julieth Mars Toussaint). A beloved colleague of Lionel’s, he is sent off by his friends and fellow train conductors at a retirement party set at a bar, early on in the film. The titular 35 shots of rum is a nearly-mythical feat of alcohol imbibement that is attempted but not achieved at this point. René, who seems reluctant in the extreme to leave the warm confines of his surrogate family, succumbs to despair the moment he crosses the boundary between the familiar and the unknown. Although the two never meet, his storyline is the manifestation of all that Joséphine fears, the warning sign telling her to stay put where she is and to never attempt to grow.
And of course she does, eventually. But in typical Denis fashion, the moment of decision is ellided, the lines delineating any simplistic dramatic structure are blurred and the attentive viewer must infer what is not stated, connect what is not filled in and glean what meanings can be found in the silence of the eyes and in the warm, inviting light of a café in the rain.
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