Delicate domestic drama about the relationship between a Parisian father and his teenage daughter. From the director of Beau Travail, Claire DenisFew 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.
