Quiet storm

Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum is a subtle,
ambiguous and emotionally intense drama

IN THE MOOD TO BROOD:
Julieth Mars Toussaint and Alex Descas

by MALCOLM FRASER

Since coming onto the scene with her autobiographical debut Chocolat in 1988, Claire Denis has made a career of quiet, understated dramas. Her minimal approach continues unabated with her latest, 35 Shots of Rum. Set in a lower-middle-class African community in the Paris suburbs, the film takes place in a world rarely visited in film, where white people are seldom seen and where the characters’ lives are neither glamorized nor played for cheap politically correct sympathy.

Lionel (Alex Descas, recently seen in Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control) is a middle-aged metro driver whose 20-something daughter Joséphine (newcomer Mati Diop) still lives with him in his high-rise apartment. Their neighbours, cab driver Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and young hunk Noé (Grégoire Colin), float through the story, with occasional hints dropped about past connections and unexpressed desires. Another subplot focuses on the retirement of René (Julieth Mars Toussaint), a colleague of Descas’s who seems burdened by inner torment.

Films featuring multiple characters, with intersecting lives and destinies intertwined by fateful coincidence, have become a mini-genre in the past decade or so. The post-Altman Hollywood take on this has been beaten half to death by Magnolia and Paul Haggis’s Crash, and the approach has also been exploited in international arthouse hits like Babel and The Edge of Heaven. At first, 35 Shots seems to be part of this trend, but fortunately Denis scrupulously avoids the genre’s clichés—implausible coincidences, unsubtle symbolism, overly ambitious Grand Statements and melodramatic revelations.

35 Shots is a film of great subtlety and even greater ambiguity, weighted heavily with unspoken emotions, absent characters and deliberate omissions. Major plot points, as well as characters’ motivations and backstories, are largely left up to viewers to figure out for themselves. Sometimes this effect is almost comical—almost every character in the film is excited to attend a concert, but the artist is never named. But what the film lacks in narrative fireworks, it more than makes up for in emotional intensity, as well as filmmaking and acting craft. Its drama is the everyday lives of ordinary people, in all their banality, despair and dignity.

35 SHOTS OF RUM OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, JULY 10