35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums)

35 SHOTS OF RUM (35 Rhums)           A            

France Germany  (100 mi)  2008  d:  Claire Denis         Official site

We could stay like this forever.           —Joséphine (Mati Diop)

An affectionate and affirming work.  Most great works of literature and cinema seem to be tragedies that continually explore a dark edge of the human soul.  What’s so unique about this film is the life affirming warmth expressed from the outset and the positive feeling of optimism, where love is explored with an amazing tenderness and poetic grace.  The daughter of a civil servant, Denis spent much of her childhood in different African countries before returning to France where she assisted other directors such as Dušan Makavejev, Costa-Gavras, Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch before directing her first feature at the age of 40, so like Toni Morrison in literature, she brings an unconventional maturity into her works.  She's one of the unsung filmmakers of our era, a director who moves between an experimental, avant garde style with slight to nonexisting narratives to more conventional narratives fairly easily, usually focusing on the personal lives of marginalized working class characters whose very ordinariness separates them from mainstream movie viewing.  This film is a wonderful expository essay on the nature of living, shown from the outset as a series of passing trains, sometimes meeting, sometimes simply traveling in opposite directions, but always running on the same track.  In what appears to be an Ozu homage of life in transition, the train montage 35 Rhums.Tindersticks. Train Montage. YouTube (3:43) in the opening set to the music by Tindersticks is a clear sign of moving from one place to another, where nothing remains static, where lives are in constant motion.  Alex Descas is Lionel (as in the model trains), a train conductor whose vantage point from the lead car we follow from time to time, a man of few words, but always serious and direct, even as he wordlessly steers his train.  He and his fellow workers meet to celebrate the retirement of one of Lionel’s old friends, Réne (Julieth Mars Toussaint), a man who plainly feels uncomfortable about his impending future and the loss of his working friendships.  The easygoing nature of this mostly black working class environment is conveyed in the sharing of drinks, where it’s customary at retirements to swig down shots of rum.   

Without revealing any background story, Lionel is a widower living in close quarters with his beautiful daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop), a student who also works nights in a record store, where one of their special moments together is her dad picking her up on his motorbike after work, or enjoying a home cooked meal together where their intimacy is beautifully expressed in their eyes as well as their accustomed routines.  Added to this triangle are two neighbors, Noé (Grégoire Colin), who openly shows his affection for Joséphine, and Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué), equally enthralled with her father, an old flame of Lionel’s who still carries a torch while assuming the surrogate role of step-mother.  Without ever actually telling the story, instead it unravels in lyrical images detailing the rhythms of life, beautifully shot by Agnès Godard who captures gestures, facial expressions, body language, or silent actions showing the distances between people, but rarely in speech.  The film evolves through various vignettes beautifully edited together and in the near perfect music selections by Tindersticks, which includes Basehead’s “Home” (http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/basehead) (4:30) which plays in the music store, or Sophia George’s “Can’t Live Without You” Sophia George- Can't live without you- 198X - YouTube (4:01), a reggae song that plays in the car on the way to a concert.  But the scene of the film is after their car breaks down in the rain and they ask the proprietor of a small restaurant and bar to stay open after closing hours, where we hear the smooth musical refrains from Ralph Thamar’s “Siboney” and the Commodores “Nightshift” 35 Shots of Rum - Dance Scene.avi YouTube (5:56), where a nice soulful groove takes a wrong turn somewhere, prompted by the music and the open expression of intimacy, where jealousy and body language reveal it all, leaving feelings abandoned and hurt, turning the night sour.  The subtleties of this scene typify the fragility of relationships, which seem so solid at one moment, only to discover the moment lasts just an instant.   

Despite the various stops along the way, this is really a different kind of love story and is largely a father and daughter journey, as they take a camper to Germany to visit Joséphine’s aunt, who is none other than Ingrid Caven, a scene stealer from Fassbinder films of old, like MOTHER KÜSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN (1975), where they had to tag on three different endings to that film, but she’s in fine form here as well, allowed to wallow in her eccentricities in an extended scene much like Gloria Swanson in SUNSET BLVD. (1950).  But this visit also reveals some of the most tender images in the film as well, the two of them visiting her mother’s grave, sleeping under the stars overlooking the sea, observing a strange procession of children carrying lanterns at night, all understated expressions of various stages of life poetically rendered with the most detached reverence.  But the ultimate gift a loving father can give his daughter is setting her free, allowing her to move on with her life, which includes a moment unlike any other in their lifetimes, which is shown with exquisite grace and an economy of means, as the film just briefly touches on what the future holds.  Denis really gets inside the lives of her characters and is one of the more distinctive filmmakers on the planet.  She is a constant reminder that cinema is still an art form, a contemplative study of humanity observing the way we treat one another through rhythm and texture, music, image, and tone.  The film couldn’t be more effortless, yet it paints a contemporary face on the modern world by simply focusing on the lives of a few people living in it, all done with an undeniable love and lyrical charm. 

No Fear, No Die (S’en Fout la Mort)

NO FEAR, NO DIE (S’en Fout la Mort)          A-                  

France  Germany  (90 mi)  1990  d:  Claire Denis

It’s a film that’s influenced by Frantz Fanon’s Peaux noire, masques blancs (Black Skins, White Masks). I understood something in Fanon’s book that touched me immensely. I am a very sensitive person who can’t stand the feeling of humiliation, regardless if black or whites are the objects of this humiliation. When I read Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), it increased my anger over the social inequities that groups and individuals are forced to endure […]. In S’en fout la mort, I deal with a French West Indian man here in Paris, exploring his psychological weakness and the spiritual tragedy of his life. Fanon describes a special type of neurosis – colonized people feeling psychologically defeated even though they are physically free to determine their future.

—Claire Denis in an interview taking place August 21, 1994 with Mark A. Reid from Jump Cut, Claire Denis interviewed by Mark A. Reid - Jump Cut

A powerful and brutally disturbing film, easily the most dramatically downbeat of all the Denis films, and the most racially charged work in her entire repertoire.  Not an easy film to digest, with metaphoric implications, it is nonetheless a work of extraordinary power, but one that keeps its seething undertones beneath the surface.  Coming early in her career, after having made the highly acclaimed Chocolat (1988), which is more of a classically structured, visually impressive European art film, this simply isn’t like that, at times feeling infurioratingly subliminal.  While both films deal with the effects of colonization, Chocolat (1988) examines symptoms of a colonized occupation, while NO FEAR, NO DIE focuses more upon the psychological impact left behind, where the postcolonial mindset still has traumatic reverberations from having been imprinted by a colonized mentality.  These are highly complex ideas that rarely ever translate well to the screen, where even Richard Wright’s Native Son (1951), starring the author as the lead character, comes across as less incendiary than the novel upon which it is based.  While Beau Travail (1999) receives heaps of praise, deservedly so, but especially from white critics, who may be less inclined to endorse a complicated and downbeat work about two black immigrants from former French colonies, where racist attitudes are prevalent throughout, making it intentionally uncomfortable and difficult to watch.  A work that was clearly inspired by Frantz Fanon, its grim racial implications are so subtly presented that some may miss it altogether, as Denis leaves plenty to the imagination, and there are no explanatory references communicated to the audience, as this is a film, much like psychological neuroses, that largely exists under the surface. 

Isaach de Bankolé, who played Protée in Chocolat (1988) is Dah, an African from Benin, while Alex Descas is Jocelyn from the West Indies, where the two are business partners smuggling roosters into France for illegal cockfights.  Their destination is an industrial factory district that is little more than a truck stop, a strange and mysterious landscape in the banlieues outside Paris where an abandoned warehouse has been refurbished inside for cockfights.  While Dah offers a sparse inner narration, Jocelyn provides the training for the animals, having grown up with them as a child on the islands, and Dah handles the business end with white club owner Pierre Ardennes, Jean-Claude Brialy from early New Wave films, whose sensuous wife Toni, Solveig Dommartin from Wim Wenders WINGS OF DESIRE (1987) and UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991), runs the bar, while the brooding son Michel (Christopher Buchholz) handles the disco.  Dah is the more jovial and outgoing of the two and seems unaffected by the callousness of his white business associates, while Jocelyn is silent for much of the film, whose growing resentment only escalates, where his troubling relationship with the whites slowly deteriorates, becoming the centerpiece of the film.  Both black actors are superb, perhaps offering the performances of their respective careers, but they do so nonverbally, as so much of the film is expressed through their silent reaction to what’s taking place around them, an often brutal and suffocating world that if they’re not careful would swallow them whole.  What’s immediately apparent is the difference in living quarters, as the whites live upstairs in relative opulence, with their own private chef, used to the finer things in life where wine and champagne are the norm, while the two blacks live downstairs in the boiler room in the same cramped space as the caged roosters.  One can only imagine the smell. 

The film opens with a quote from black American writer Chester Himes, who emigrated to France in the 1950’s, a contemporary of fellow expatriate black writers Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and James Baldwin:  “All men, whatever their race, color or origins, are capable of anything and everything.”  Denis finds a way of visualizing this expression through the underworld of illegal cockfighting, a savage ritual that exists in order to please the men who bet heavily on the outcome.  The intensity of the men screaming on the sidelines with wads of cash in their hands matches the flurry of blurred movement in the pit where the two roosters continually jump around and peck at one another.  This violent portrait of exploitation overlaps with the private worlds of the men who run the operation.  No one identifies with the animals more than Jocelyn, who feeds and trains them, while also nursing them back to health after a fight, often seen dancing with them in the training ring while listening to blaring rap music.  This draws the attention of Toni, who makes unannounced visits into their lower domain, where the underlying sexual vibe suggests these are the men she’s really interested in, as they name their most prized rooster after her, where the extreme physicality of their world is beautifully captured by the director’s approach to making such uniquely sensual films.  It’s in scenes like this where the audience realizes these men have no privacy, where the lowered ceilings offer a claustrophobic environment that couldn’t feel more oppressively suffocating and confined, little more than an underground prison.  Jocelyn’s attachment to the animals becomes problematic, as he identifies only with the lower life forms, seething with resentment at the brazenly offensive manner of Ardenne, whose arrogance compels him to freely discuss how he had an affair with Jocelyn’s mother, describing how he has her eyes, where one sees hatred brewing in the eyes of his own son Michel, not to mention Toni, where men crudely brag about their sexual exploits. 

A word about Michel, as this character figures prominently in Denis films, perhaps best represented by Nicolas Duvauchelle in White Material (2010), the son of the white owner of a coffee plantation in Africa, where he inherits privilege, growing up expecting he can have anything he wants, and that he is entitled to it.  His self-centered views, never having to think of anyone else except himself, are in stark contrast to people of color, who always have to make adjustments for white people and grow up wary of people like him, as they are capable of doing just about anything, and getting away with it.  In this film, Michel has little screen time, yet he has a powerful influence, as he’s accidentally interrupted by Dah and Jocelyn who arrive in the basement while he’s having sex with Toni, his father’s wife, who stares directly at Jocelyn, which elevates the moral void to tragic Shakespearean proportions, as the Ardennes have no boundaries or shame.  When viewed in this context, nothing is more dangerous than slighted masculinity, where in the eyes of blacks, there is no greater threat than white male violence, which is so unpredictable, supposedly your friend one moment, but viciously attacking you the next, where that violence may erupt at any time.  Denis’s film pulsates with that untapped rage, ready to go off at any moment, where her film is a choreography of untapped masculinity, sexual desire, violence, and unforeseen danger, where the clash of these forces is like electrically charged objects continually bumping into one another, where it’s only a matter of time before there’s an explosion, heightened by the co-mingling forces of hostility, as represented by the oppressed and the oppressor, the colonized and the colonizer, where every scene deals with one protruding into the other.   

Relentlessly bleak and uncompromisingly honest, the film offers a parallel into the dangerous and inhumane living conditions of many black male immigrants living in France.  When viewed under the lens of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the colonized are forced to live in disgustingly cramped conditions resembling slave quarters, often made to feel like animals, which has a way of affecting their psychological outlook, as they are drawn to failure, feeling defeated before they begin, where the transience and impermanency of their lives diminishes their human value and self-worth, resembling the cheap, exploitive goods that are a staple of colonial trade and commerce.  Ultimately humiliated and ashamed, especially when looked upon by an attractive white woman, where they are powerless to reciprocate, as it was the kiss of death during the slavery era, the colonized black man’s view of himself is extremely pessimistic, as his dignity has been destroyed, where he’s inclined to have a death wish to simply put an end to his misery. Alongside this dour mindset, Denis stages a series of high stakes cockfights, where Ardenne, being the vile and contemptible man that he is, ups the ante, making the fights even more brutal, believing he can make more money if they tie razors to the rooster’s feet, which means instant death, as roosters are suddenly carried out in plastic bags.  For Jocelyn, who trains these animals like they were his own, this is the ultimate indignity and disgrace.  While he wanted to leave earlier, as he sensed Ardenne’s manic energy was uncontainable, Dah tracks him down and brings him back, where he’s forced to endure this slaughter of the only creatures that hold any meaning in his life, all in the name of greed and money, so reminiscent of the amusement of men obtained by pitting gladiators against one another in the spectacle that was the Roman Colosseum.  Slowly, through strangely unbalanced images, like a scene of Jocelyn dancing with a white girl, continually holding her too close, Jocelyn is seen losing his equilibrium, where his ultimate breakdown is heartbreaking, as is Dah’s comforting response afterwards, where the simplicity of childhood memories even under colonization reflect a time of happiness and innocence that had not yet been lost.  Once more, though sparingly used, the raw and soulful music of Abdullah Ibrahim offers a perfect compliment.      

Trouble Every Day

TROUBLE EVERY DAY                    B                     

France  Germany  Japan  (101 mi)  2001  d:  Claire Denis

Following the unanimous acclaim for Beau Travail (1999), arguably the director’s most erotic and deeply romantic work, this boldly challenges viewers with what must be what is described as an adult film, as it’s certainly not for everyone, revealing far more than the eye can see, significant as the only Claire Denis film that dabbles in the horror genre, something of a modern era vampire film, a graphically violent and thoroughly disturbing vision of carnal desire as a form of cannibalism. becoming something exquisitely revolting and truly frightening by the end, equating sex with death, and not like anything else out there.  Panned at Cannes and critically dismissed in America, the film has undergone a certain revival among cinephiles who recognize rarity when they see it, but the slow and languid pace of the film will likely turn off horror lovers, while the excruciating blood-letting will turn off art film devotees.  Despite the raw and graphic subject matter, this remains a Claire Denis film, expressed with an artful flourish and filled with poetic ambiguity throughout.  Only a more recent film like Tomas Alfredson’s LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008) conveys a similar attention to detail when it comes to flesh-eating monsters starved for blood, while at the same time offering a haunting sensuality behind the camera.  Beautifully filmed by Agnès Godard, this must be viewed as one of her triumphs, as this is a visually stunning film that operates out of its own unique conception, where it lives by its uncompromising rules even as it references vintage horror films.  At heart, this is a FRANKENSTEIN (1931) movie, where the tropical experiments of Doctor Léo Sémeneau (Alex Descas) went awry while researching experimental brain medicine and have now altered the human gene pool, creating vampire-like creatures with a ravenous need not only for blood, but for human flesh. 

The film may also be traced to THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1977) and CAT PEOPLE (1982), both films with earlier Black and White versions, as the first deals with the grotesque and disfigured effects of medical experimentation gone wrong, while the second deals with erotic transformation, where the sex urge turns humans into blood devouring, flesh eating beasts, returning to human form only after feeding.  However, in the hands of Denis, a consummate artist known for her poetic subtleties, much of what’s displayed onscreen is graphically disconcerting.  Opening with the music of Tendersticks, it’s one of their better scores, especially the hauntingly beautiful funeral dirge that opens and closes the film and has a way of burrowing under your skin, Trouble Every Day Opening Song Tindersticks - YouTube (3:13), while it’s also extremely effective the way Denis opens with a darkened kiss that fades to black for a lengthy period of time, leaving the audience in a state of suspended animation.  Once the picture returns, the familiar face of actress Béatrice Dalle is seen as Coré, flagging down truckers on the side of the road, where all we see is the bloody aftermath, where her husband (Sémeneau) tracks her down and brings her home, tenderly washing the blood off of her, then locking her into a boarded up room in their mansion.  Simultaneous to this event, an American couple on their honeymoon are flying to Paris, medical researcher Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) and his overly delicate wife June (Tricia Vessey), where Shane is inflicted with the same disease, having to continually hide from her every time he’s aroused.  While he’s using the honeymoon as a pretext to track down the infamous doctor, June only knows he’s hiding some deep, dark secret, and when she hears him violently masturbating in the bathroom, her pounds on the door evoke sheer terror. 

While this is a thoroughly confounding film, one that makes great use of Béatrice Dalle's physical features, giving her an animal-like presence, the film pushes the boundaries of cinema, much of it without dialogue, but using screams of hysteria, reflective of the Silent era, where it weaves in and out of dream states seemingly at will, and where half of this French-language film, including the title, is spoken in English, contributing to an otherworldy effect, like something out of Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932).  When a young man’s (Nicolas Duvauchelle) curiosity leads him to Coré’s door, words can’t describe the sense of grim bewilderment overcoming the audience when they realize she is incredulously eating him before our eyes, smearing his blood all over the walls afterwards.  While the audience is aware something is not right with Shane as well, none of the people he meets have a clue, as he spends most of the film popping pills and hallucinating his blood-drenched wife, searching for a cure, but to no avail.  A seemingly innocuous event leads to the savage finale, as the maid (Florence Loiret-Caille) lingers in their room after making the bed, leaving her scent on the bedcovers.  Throughout the film this scene has been set up by shots of the back of the young maid’s neck, which Shane has obviously been tracking, like wild prey on the loose, eventually unleashing a wild, animalistic hunger that will not be denied.  It is this exploration of man’s basest rape instincts that prove to be the most deeply unsettling images of the film, like the horrors of IRREVERSIBLE (2002), complete with blood curdling screams and graphic sexual bloodletting that are among the most difficult scenes to endure in a supremely grotesque finale, as Shane finally gives in to his bloodlust, Claire Denis - Trouble Every Day...  YouTube (5:39).  A haunting shadow of doom overwhelms the senses along with a Tendersticks refrain, sending the audience out the door in a shivering fright.      

I Can't Sleep (J’ai pas sommeil)

I CAN’T SLEEP (J’ai pas sommeil)       A-   
France  Switzerland  Germany  (110 mi)  1994  d:  Claire Denis 

A witty and sophisticated drama of interconnectedness, much of this feels like a choreography of missed connections, where even well past an hour or so into the film the viewer still has no idea where this film is heading, and may still be wondering even after the final credits roll, as this is an oddball, character driven story where the characters take on greater significance than any story developments themselves, many of which simply disappear into thin air.  A perfect example is the opening sequence, where two helicopter policemen are seen enjoying a joke, including extensive laughter that continues at length, yet the viewer never hears the original joke.  Moreover, these two policemen are never seen again in the film and don’t at all figure into the action.  Nonetheless, they are the opening shot, flying high above the city of Paris and the connecting highways leading into the city.  From one of these random highways, we see an old beat-up car with foreign license plates, presumably Russian Cyrillic letters, where an attractive young (as it turns out Lithuanian) woman named Daiga (Yekaterina Golubeva) has a cigarette dangling out of her mouth as she approaches town, where the radio cuts to a breaking news story about the latest victim of the so-called “granny killer,” a string of murders targeting elderly women, presumably for petty cash.  However, another pair of clearly inept policemen *do* figure prominently into the storyline, as they keep popping up unexpectedly, usually in the development of some plot detail.  A seemingly disconnected shot reveals a young black man wearing a white suit, who turns out to be Camille (Richard Courcet), getting into a fight with a car passenger, who scrambles back into the car as it quickly drives away, as Camille’s white suit is a stark contrast to the two black garbage men who then pull into the frame, all staring at one another as if each is an alien from another planet.  

As Daiga gets her life sorted out, where there is a game of musical chairs played in the Lithuanian community to determine just where she will stay, much of this plays out in exaggerated caricature, comic portrayals rarely seen in any Denis film, where this actually more resembles the strange visit from the Hungarian cousin who arrives unexpectedly in America in Jim Jarmusch’s STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1984), one of the directors Denis worked with before making her own films.  Daiga ends up staying with an elderly Latvian hotel owner, Line Renaud (who can be heard singing with Dean Martin in the opening song heard on the car radio) where as it happens, Camille has a room at the same hotel with his boyfriend.  Daiga, who speaks little to no French, was led to believe she’d have a job in Paris, but when she sees the theater producer, he’s just been stringing her along in hopes he might get into her pants.  Completely in passing, Béatrice Dalle, who appeared in the Paris episode of Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991), is initially seen sitting at an outdoor café, where her character is not even introduced.  Instead we meet Camille and his brother Théo (Alex Descas) with his young son Harry in another apartment, seen talking through a thin wall separating their beds.  Dalle turns out to be Mona, the child’s mother who has a hard time spending any extended time with her husband Théo,  who doesn’t appear to want anything to do with her.  He plays violin in a Caribbean band, seen here to Kali’s song “Racines” Kali-Racines-JaiPasSommeil - YouTube (4:03), and dreams of returning to live on the beach in Martinique, which completely leaves Mona out of the picture.  In a nearby apartment, there are loud cries in the night, presumably from domestic violence, but when Théo goes to investigate, they all look suspiciously at one another. 

While it’s a long, novelesque set up introducing all the central characters, working with more than thirteen characters, none of whom would typically figure in films we’re used to seeing, as they would be marginal characters relegated to secondary roles, but here it’s an interesting portrait of the alienating aspects of cultural diversity, something later explored in greater detail in Michael Haneke’s CODE UNKNOWN (2000).  In Denis’s film, however, these fragmented, often interconnecting episodes are largely unresolved, perhaps reaching a climax when Camille performs at a nightclub in drag, an intensely powerful performance where the audience stands transfixed, all standing just a few feet away, at his anguished “cry of love,” perhaps the theme of the film, but he never once returns their look, eventually turning his back, hiding the inner secrets to his soul, seen here to Jean Louis Murat’s “Le Lien Défait (The Broken Bond)” (J'ai Pas Sommeil - Claire Denis -1994 ), which casts a strangely mystifying aura over the rest of the film.  Camille has a volatile relationship with his own blond-haired boyfriend, mirroring the instability of his brother’s relationship, while the two brothers themselves rarely even speak to one another.  There’s a telling scene at their own mother’s birthday party, where each brother vies for their mother’s attention on the dance floor.  Everyone leads solitary lives, perfectly expressed by the largely unseen, lonely existences of the elderly who are victims of prey, all just part of the isolated lives of outsiders, where the difficulty to be accepted by the mainstream places particular pressures on this group, as they all appear to be drifters leading aimless lives. 

Instead of actions driving the narrative of the film, what’s more intriguing here is what isn’t revealed, what’s clouded under the layers of silences, especially between the two brothers who remain strangers to one another.  Camille arrives at Théo’s door with something to tell him, but then leaves without a word, earlier seen at a hospital clinic, where there is a noticeable mark on his cheek, but nothing more is revealed, where one might surmise he is HIV positive, but the director leaves this intentionally ambiguous, adding a brief sequence of Camille dancing in a darkly lit gay nightclub.  Daiga, who eventually finds work as a hotel cleaning woman, and who couldn’t be less interested in her work, appears to be the observing eyes behind the film, as we get telling glimpses of what she sees, like clues unraveling the mysteries of the film, where she sees behind the hidden lives, being near invisible herself.  This is a film of marginalized lives told through a recent headlines grabbing incident where there was an actual serial killer of elderly women in Paris.  While the killer is revealed, rather than deriving pleasure or enjoyment from committing acts of murder, the murderer kills with the same boredom and disconnection that plagues the rest of their life.  Denis provides a highly impressionistic, richly textured look at the hidden layers lurking underneath the incident, examining issues of immigration, disconnection, race, and urban alienation, where characters are often asked by authorities to see their papers, but the viewer can be overwhelmed by the loss of intimacy reflected in the film, and how easily the grief and sorrows of the marginalized remain forever invisible to the larger mainstream society at large.  

2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #1 35 Shots of Rum

35 SHOTS OF RUM               A                                 

France  Germany  (100 mi)  2008  d:  Claire Denis

We could stay like this forever.           —Joséphine (Mati Diop)

An affectionate and affirming work.  Most great works of literature and cinema seem to be tragedies that continually explore a dark edge of the human soul.  What’s so unique about this film is the life affirming warmth expressed from the outset and the positive feeling of optimism, where love is explored with an amazing tenderness and poetic grace.  The daughter of a civil servant, Denis spent much of her childhood in different African countries before returning to France where she assisted other directors such as Dušan Makavejev, Costa-Gavras, Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch before directing her first feature at the age of 40, so like Toni Morrison in literature, she brings an unconventional maturity into her works.  She's one of the unsung filmmakers of our era, a director who moves between an experimental, avant garde style with slight to nonexisting narratives to more conventional narratives fairly easily, usually focusing on the personal lives of marginalized working class characters whose very ordinariness separates them from mainstream movie viewing.  This film is a wonderful expository essay on the nature of living, shown from the outset as a series of passing trains, sometimes meeting, sometimes simply traveling in opposite directions, but always running on the same track.  In what appears to be an Ozu homage of life in transition, the train montage in the opening is a clear sign of moving from one place to another, where nothing remains static, where lives are in constant motion.  Alex Descas is Lionel (as in the model trains), a train conductor whose vantage point from the lead car we follow from time to time, a man of few words, but always serious and direct, even as he wordlessly steers his train.  He and his fellow workers meet to celebrate the retirement of one of Lionel’s old friends, Réne (Julieth Mars Toussaint), a man who plainly feels uncomfortable about his impending future and the loss of his working friendships.  The easygoing nature of this mostly black working class environment is conveyed in the sharing of drinks, where it’s customary at retirements to swig down shots of rum. 

Without revealing any background story, Lionel is a widower living in close quarters with his beautiful daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop), a student who also works nights in a record store, where one of their special moments together is her dad picking her up on his motorbike after work, or enjoying a home cooked meal together where their intimacy is beautifully expressed in their eyes as well as their accustomed routines.  Added to this triangle are two neighbors, Noé (Grégoire Colin), who openly shows his affection for Joséphine, and Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué), equally enthralled with her father, an old flame of Lionel’s who still carries a torch while assuming the surrogate role of step-mother.  Without ever actually telling the story, instead it unravels in lyrical images detailing the rhythms of life, beautifully shot by Agnès Godard who captures gestures, facial expressions, body language, or silent actions showing the distances between people, but rarely in speech.  The film evolves through various vignettes beautifully edited together and in the near perfect music selections by Tindersticks, which includes Basehead’s “Home,” which plays in the music store (http://www.baseheadmusic.com/fr_index.cfm), or Sophia George’s “Can’t Live Without You,” a reggae song that plays in the car on the way to a concert (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5gd4Ish7OM).   But the scene of the film is after their car breaks down in the rain and they ask the proprietor of a small restaurant and bar to stay open after closing hours, where we hear the smooth refrains from the Commodores “Nightshift” (Commodores - Nightshift), where a nice soulful groove takes a wrong turn somewhere, prompted by the music and the open expression of intimacy, where jealousy and body language reveal it all, leaving feelings abandoned and hurt, turning the night sour.  The subtleties of this scene typify the fragility of relationships, which seem so solid at one moment, only to discover the moment lasts just an instant.  

Despite the various stops along the way, this is really a different kind of love story and is largely a father and daughter journey, as they take a camper to Germany to visit Joséphine’s aunt, who is none other than Ingrid Caven, a scene stealer from Fassbinder films of old, like MOTHER KÜSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN (1975), where they had to tag on three different endings to that film, but she’s in fine form here as well, allowed to wallow in her eccentricities in an extended scene much like Gloria Swanson in SUNSET BLVD. (1950).  But this visit also reveals some of the most tender images in the film as well, the two of them visiting her mother’s grave, sleeping under the stars overlooking the sea, observing a strange procession of children carrying lanterns at night, all understated expressions of various stages of life poetically rendered with the most detached reverence.  But the ultimate gift a loving father can give his daughter is setting her free, allowing her to move on with her life, which includes a moment unlike any other in their lifetimes, which is shown with exquisite grace and an economy of means, as the film just briefly touches on what the future holds.  Denis really gets inside the lives of her characters and is one of the more distinctive filmmakers on the planet.  She is a constant reminder that cinema is still an art form, a contemplative study of humanity observing the way we treat one another through rhythm and texture, music, image, and tone.  The film couldn’t be more effortless, yet it paints a contemporary face on the modern world by simply focusing on the lives of a few people living in it, all done with an undeniable love and lyrical charm.