Claire Denis is the most striking of female European directors — and, since she was brought up in Africa, her sympathy for and understanding of Africans is unparalleled.
Chocolate, her first feature, was a brilliant summation of the colonial experience; and this quiet film is equally good, albeit in a different mode.
The protagonists are Lionel (Alex Descas), a black train driver on Paris’s rapid-transit rail network, and his daughter, Josephine (Mati Diop), who is studying at university and has lived alone with him since her mother’s death years earlier.
They have a deep and loving bond but, as in Yoshiro Ozu’s classic Late Spring (to which Denis pays tribute), we know she will soon have to go her own way.
This she resists, spurning the hesitant advances of the young man (Gregoire Colin) who lives nearby with his cat, and refusing to admit that her father is capable of his own life solo too.
Denis’s film is principally about change, and the traumas it presents. One of Lionel’s friends (Julieth Mars Toussaint), also a train driver, is in a state of deep depression after he has been forced to take early retirement, and the woman next door (Nicole Dogué), who has a long-lasting yen for Lionel, can’t take the prospect of being cut out of his life.
All this is superbly shot by Agnès Godard during a bleak Parisian autumn and has a spare screenplay that takes its time to unfold.
The smallest detail is given due weight, and we feel we begin to know these people. The cast seldom puts a foot wrong.
Denis has never made a more resonant film.
35 Shots Of Rum (35 Rhums)
Cert: 12A
