Admirers of Claire Denis may be a
little disoriented by 35 Shots of Rum (2008).
It lacks the menace of her recent work,
notably Trouble Every Day (2001) and The
Intruder (2004), whose fragmented narratives
encompass psychosis and murder. 35 Shots
of Rum more closely resembles Friday Night (2002), but even that minimalist study of a
one-night stand is tense and unsettling: a
scene in which the protagonist’s casual lover
caresses another woman in a restroom, for
example, turns out to be just a daydream.
There is a characteristic blurring of fantasy
and reality here that creates suspense and
even anxiety. Watching many of Denis’
films, you will often get lost on a dark path
somewhere between the believable world
and the macabre distortions of a nightmare.
Yet 35 Shots of Rum is not stressful. Set
in a Paris housing project, this warm and
linear movie follows four characters as their
lives get reconfigured. Train driver Lionel is
a widower who shares an apartment with his
devoted daughter Jo. Gabrielle, his former
lover, and Noé, who dates Jo, live nearby. Noé
is offered a job in Gabon and this accelerates
his relationship with Jo. At the end they marry
(although the ceremony itself is not shown),
but not before father and daughter have
traveled to Germany to visit Jo’s maternal
grandmother. The narrative is skeletal even
by Denis’ usual standards, and the way so
much remains unstated is crucial. “You’re
not much of a talker,” says Lionel’s suicidal
co-worker René. “You never say a thing.”
“Still so quiet, Lionel,” adds the grandmother
later. When hostility or discomfort surface,
it is not language that comes to the rescue:
instead a situation gets placated by the
touch of a hand, a glance of recognition, a kiss.
The central characters do not negotiate, analyze
their behavior, or investigate motives. It is as if
they have decided that talking cannot alleviate
suffering or dissipate aggression.
René is the only one who tries to articulate
his state of mind. “I’d like to have died young,”
he says emptily. What could Lionel possibly
say to do any good? He hugs René, lends him
a book about depression (Fritz Zorn’s Mars),
spends time with him. When all else fails, he
manages a few meager words: “when I get dark
thoughts, I think of my daughter.” Nothing can
save René from his self-destructive angst and
he kills himself in a railway tunnel, apparently
timing it so that Lionel has to find the body. 35
Shots of Rum does not suggest that solitude,
hostility, and anguish can be eradicated. This
is acknowledged too when the grandmother
recalls Jo’s mother: “I taught her to swim. She
was scared of the water. We’re all scared of
it. I’m also scared of that sea. So vast, so wide.
And when you scream, no one hears you.” But
mostly the film explores something much more
benign—a quiet, tactful togetherness.
Tension of course sometimes builds up, but it
never ignites dangerously or leads to retaliation.
When emotions overheat—when Jo thinks Noé
is going to leave, when Gabrielle’s car breaks
down in bad weather on the way to a concert—the
flare-up is brief and curtailed. Gabrielle, whose
past longing for Lionel is revealed in a letter Jo
finds in a box of family souvenirs (“please let me
live by your side…”), is the key character in this
respect. She pesters Jo about going “as a family”
to the concert. Although the request is intrusive,
it is not rebuffed and the four neighbors set out
for the gig later. Near the end, Gabrielle asks
to help with the bride’s hair. “She’s doing fine
alone,” Lionel says, blocking the way. Yet in the
closing scene the rebuke is forgotten and these
two celebrate together. The painful undertow of
frustrated desire does not significantly impede
the current of friendship.
35 Shots of Rum insists on the importance of
humdrum actions that enable conflict to be preempted.
Returning home, Jo puts some clothes
in the washing machine. Then Lionel arrives
(first ringing the doorbell so that she will not be
surprised) and takes a shower before switching
on the machine. Jo does not disrupt the water
supply, knowing Lionel will start the laundry
promptly. Routines like this minimize both
friction and discussion. Nothing needs to be
said. Noé stops by the apartment one morning
before taking a trip and Lionel shares an omelette
with him. They eat unfussily on their feet while
Jo in her dressing gown watches. Lionel asks
a question: “Taking your car or the subway?”
Noé replies: “I’ll take my car. I’ll leave it in the
lot.” That is all. When you rewatch the scene,
it becomes clear how much emotion is in play
between Jo’s father and her lover, but there is no
crackle of antagonism. The apartment is a sort
of utopia. “We have everything here,” insists Jo.
“We’ll do as we please,” Lionel says, “we always
have.” The idyll seems natural: you could start to
believe that many people live harmoniously like
this and 35 Shots of Rum should be treasured for
its effect of credible peacefulness. This effect,
however, is more complex than it may seem
because it arises out of Denis’ engagement with
an earlier film, Yasujiro Ozu’s great Japanese
family drama, Late Spring (1949).
Released to mark the sixtieth anniversary
of Ozu’s birth, the 1993 documentary Talking
with Ozu contains a segment in which Denis is
in fact rather reluctant to talk about him. She
confesses for a start that she dislikes auteurism
and the “cult of cinephilia.” What is more,
admiration for the transgressive cinema of
Shohei Imamura and Nagisa Oshima meant
that she avoided Ozu for a long time until she
happened “almost by chance” to see An Autumn
Afternoon (1963), his last film (itself a revisiting
of Late Spring). The film affected her deeply but
she does not really explain why, except to relate
that she had a Brazilian grandfather who looked
like Ozu, “olive-skinned, with a little mustache
… a light-colored shirt and a cloth hat.” (Denis
has mentioned in interviews that the character
of Lionel is modeled on this grandfather.) So she
felt a kind of family tie to Ozu: “I felt close to
him.” Denis’ affection is palpable; she half-smiles
tenderly as she talks in this odd, vague way.
She then alludes to Late Spring, “a wonderful
story and also one that has connections to my
own life” (the connections are not spelled out),
before she stands to read an extract from the
film’s script. Denis’ attitude to her predecessor
is puzzlingly unclear in Talking with Ozu; she
quite simply avoids plain speaking on the topic.
But it makes better sense in the light of 35 Shots
of Rum, which manages to combine dissent and
loyalty, significantly altering aspects of Late
Spring and erasing much of its painfulness
without ever repudiating it as template and
inspiration.
Late Spring is the first film in the “Noriko
trilogy” that also comprises Early Summer (1951)
and Tokyo Story (1953). In all of these superb
works, Setsuko Hara plays a woman who is
reluctant to marry (each film’s Noriko is a different
character). It was still traditional in the immediate
postwar years for middle-class marriages to be
arranged by parents and it was progressive even
to consult the young people. When Noriko in
Early Summer spontaneously chooses to marry a
widower who has a young daughter, the decision
causes consternation. “It was so thoughtless of
her to decide on her own,” says her genial mother.
“She acts like she grew up all by herself.” Such
sentiments shock contemporary western viewers
more than they would have done Japanese
audiences of the time. Nevertheless Ozu, without
taking a subversive position, counts the human
cost of such disapproval.
The scholarly patriarch (played by Ozu’s
favorite actor, Chishu Ryu) in Late Spring is
another widower. Doting Noriko is in her late
twenties and her aunt and father believe that she
must leave the family home. “She should have
married years ago,” says the aunt, formulating
a proposition that will echo throughout the
trilogy—“It’s about time you got married” (Early
Summer), “I want to see you married as soon as
possible” (Tokyo Story). Noriko is told that her
father is interested in remarrying a widow. In
one of Late Spring’s most famous scenes, Noriko
looks in horror at an exchange of bows that takes
place during a Noh performance. Faced with the
prospect of a stepmother usurping her, Noriko
consents to a match.
Father and daughter take a last trip together
to Kyoto, during which he exhorts her to make
the best of marriage, even though it may not be
easy. “You’re starting a new life,” he says, “one
that you and Satake must build together, one in
which I play no part. That’s the order of human
life and history.” The order of life it may be, but
it is also a sham. At the end of Late Spring, he
admits that he never intended to remarry. He and
the aunt lied in order to arrange Noriko’s nuptials
by stealth. In Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (BFI
Publishing/Princeton University Press, 1988),
David Bordwell notes that in its own way this
cynical manipulation is liberal because “this
father will not simply order her to marry.” The
lie avoids outright tyranny and thus amounts to
“a reconciliation of tradition with modernity and
liberalism.” But this is small mercy, as Ozu shows.
In the Noh sequence, father and daughter are
sitting together. After a while he leans forward,
looks to his left, and bows to an unseen person.
Noriko then bows too before a cut shows the
smiling widow. Back to Noriko, distress dissolving
her concentration: she struggles to retain her
woman. Ozu then alternates wide shots with
close-ups of Noriko’s downturned face as
shock and bitterness play over it. Just before
the end of the scene the audience around her
is shown—everyone else is intently observing
the actors while she is hunched over in agony.
Two visual motifs therefore signal her plight.
An idea of captivity is expressed both by the
furtive, unreciprocated looking, and by her
partially collapsed posture as she sits among
rigidly aligned bodies.
The reworking in 35 Shots of Rum is
radical. Lionel, Gabrielle, Noé, and Jo do not
reach the concert—the social obligation is
not met—because the car breaks down. They
find a simple restaurant where they eat and,
with a calypso version of “Siboney” and then
the Commodores’ “Nightshift” playing on
the music system, dance. (According to an
interview at www.dailyplastic.com, Denis
initially wanted to use Prince’s “Little Red
Corvette.”) First Lionel dances with Gabrielle
but looks at Jo, who smiles back. Then
father and daughter take a turn before Noé
cuts in, smiling mischievously at Lionel. He
sits down and watches them ambivalently.
Finally, Lionel dances with the restaurant
owner while Gabrielle looks back resentfully
(Noriko’s distress diluted and displaced). By
contrast with the way Ozu emphasizes that
Noriko is trapped, in Denis’ scene there is
a constant mobility. As with the omeletteeating,
there is no shortage of emotional
drama here—love, competition, jealousy, fear,
shame, anger—but it diffuses like a vapor
trail. There is a playful pattern rather than
fixity and repression. The relay of glances
binds these characters together even though
not everyone gets the look she or he wants. In
this way, Denis reorganizes Ozu’s Noh scene
so that it no longer has a victim.
Things go from bad to worse in Late
Spring. The nadir is reached during the Kyoto
visit when Noriko speaks out. Seated once
more, she lifts up her downcast eyes and her
face is transformed by a timid but ardent
smile as she manages to stifle her despair in
order to make an appeal: “I want us to stay
as we are. I don’t want to go anywhere. Being
with you is enough for me. I’m happy just as
I am. Even marriage couldn’t make me any
happier. I’m content with this life.” Her father
tries to interrupt, but she presses on: “No, no.
You marry if you want to, Father. I just want
to be by your side. I’m so fond of you. Being
with you like this is my greatest happiness.
Please, Father, why can’t we just stay as we
are?” (Denis will again relocate the negative
emotion—Noriko’s filial distress passes to
Gabrielle: the plea to stay by the man’s side
is found in her old letter.)
This politely devastating encounter
alternates between isolated close-ups of the
two speakers, but there is also a two-shot that
represents the companionship that is being
destroyed. Noriko’s father is unrelenting and
the pathos of the scene is only intensified,
and intensified to an almost unbearable
degree, by the compassion and patience
he exhibits as he explains the terms of her
subjugation and the con-trick philosophy of
the life cycle used to enforce it. What follows
is terrible—no matter how reconciling, no
matter how progressive by the standards of
the day—because he demands that Noriko
renounce any dissent and deny the doubt that
is piercing her. “I was being very selfish,” she
duly says, her head bowed respectfully while
her eyes have gone blank in making this
forced confession. “I’m glad you understand,”
he replies. “I didn’t want you marrying feeling
the way you did … Soon you’ll look back on
this conversation and laugh.”
It is this scene—specifically the exchange
about the life cycle—from which Denis
reads in Talking with Ozu, her steady, mild
voice destroying some of its cruelty. You
could say that Denis is a fondly disobedient
granddaughter to Ozu. The act of reading
from the script of Late Spring is both
intimate and resistant; as such it prefigures
the more extensive process of rethinking
that occurs in 35 Shots of Rum—a process
that is neither dutifully subordinate nor
directly quarrelsome. With the same tact
that prevails among her main characters,
Denis creates a peaceable alternative to Late
Spring in which freedom and loyalty turn out
to be compatible.
There is so much coercive moralizing and
pontificating in Ozu’s film. Denis’ remarkable
decision at key moments in 35 Shots of Rum is to reduce them to silence. In her version
of the Kyoto conversation too, father and
daughter spend some final hours together
before the end of their cohabitation, but in
35 Shots of Rum they do not discuss what is
going to occur or debate its morality. Denis’
renunciation of speech is most obvious and
moving in the shots of Lionel and Jo in their
camper van. You hear the sea, the clink of a
bottle, some sniffs and sighs, and the sound
of passing children singing in German
that blends with Tindersticks’ score. After
night has fallen, at last there is a fragment
of speech. The two of them are lying under
a blanket. It is very windy. The music fades
away and Jo says: “I like being here with you—
we could live like this forever.” It is not a plea
or a protest and it is answered with a mere
mumble of affirmation. It is not even much of
an expression of hope or consolation. Conflict
and agitation are absent. Noriko’s anguished
“why can’t we stay as we are?” becomes
“we could live like this forever,” which is a
beautifully open-ended sort of goodbye.
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Rob White, editor of Film Quarterly, is the author of The Third Man (BFI Film Classics, 2003).