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. 

In a Year of 13 Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden)

IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden)       A               

Frankfurt, Germany  (124 mi)  July – August  1978  d:  Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The film IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS is told through the encounters of a man during the last five days of his life and it tries, on the basis of these encounters, to figure out whether this man’s decision, that on the final day, the fifth, he will allow no further days to follow, that he will refuse, is somehow understandable, or perhaps even acceptable.

—Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1978)

Every seventh year is a lunar year. Those people whose lives are essentially dominated by their emotions suffer particularly strongly from depressions in these lunar years. The same is also true of years with 13 new moons, albeit not quite so strongly. And if a lunar year also happens to be a year with 13 new moons, the result is often a personal catastrophe.

In an unfortunately short career, from 1969 until his drug-induced death in 1982, Fassbinder directed 40 feature-length films.  One similarity in all of Fassbinder’s films are characters, straight or gay, male or female, who are unable to connect with people in the world around them, whose frustration with their own lives provides the meaning to his films.  A raw, searing, emotional powerhouse, with Fassbinder as the writer, director, cameraman, art director, and editor (with Juliane Lorenz), an extremely provocative and unimaginably compelling response to the guilt the director felt from his partner Armin Meier’s suicide, probably on Fassbinder’s birthday May 31st 1978 in Fassbinder’s apartment while he was receiving accolades at the Cannes Film Festival for DESPAIR (1978), allegedly due to their impending split, the 2nd such suicide in Fassbinder’s personal life, making relationships appear hopelessly dangerous and impossible.  Shot just a month after the death, the subject of the film, which follows the last five days of transsexual Elvira, born Erwin, unwanted and raised by nuns, played powerfully and tragically by Volker Spengler, who rarely speaks above a poetic whisper, where Erwin falls in love with Anton Saetz (Gottfried John), a rich Jewish Holocaust survivor from Bergen-Belsen who now owns real estate in Frankfurt, a city portrayed as a soulless expression of the sadistic effects of capitalism.  Saetz watches a scene with his bodyguards from the Jerry Lewis movie YOU’RE NEVER TOO YOUNG (1955) Jerry Lewis - You're Never Too Young - YouTube (4:18), featuring Jerry masquerading as a member of a female teenage marching band in what has to be one of Fassbinder’s most unforgettable uses of irony, and remarks to Erwin, offhandedly, “too bad you’re not a girl,” which was enough to cause Erwin to have his sex changed, the ultimate act of love, demasculation, and a willingness to die for his love, only to be rejected and laughed at by Saetz, later beaten by men on the street, causing Elvira to revisit the stations of her life.    

Often characters will speak long passages of dialogue while seemingly unconnected images are seen onscreen.  In the company of her friend, a sweet-natured whore, Zora (Ingrid Craven), Elvira sets out to tour the slaughterhouse where she as a he used to work as a butcher, the visuals are similar to Godard’s WEEKEND (1967), but Elvira’s underlying narrative describing her own story is excruciatingly painful, an assaultive, agonizing, yet ecstatic scene, using historical trauma to communicate a sense of the personal, perhaps Fassbinder’s reference to the slaughter of the Holocaust:  “It’s not against life at all.  It is life itself.  The way the blood streams, and death, that’s what gives an animal’s life meaning in the first place.  And the smell when they die and they know death is coming and that it’s beautiful and they wait for it...Come with me, I’ll show you.  It’ll smell, and we’ll see them die and hear their cries, cries for deliverance.”  While the meats are butchered, stripped, and flayed, the intensity of the images mixed with the near hysterical pitch of Volker Spengler’s voice leave a lasting impression that sticks with the viewer through every moment of the film.  Elvira can be heard telling her friend Zora about her life with her last lover, mimicking his distraught, intoxicating lines as an actor, words competing with barely audible images, how she made a “man” out of him quoting a famous final passage from Goethe’s Torquato Tasso, which directly alludes to the relation of pain to expression, of containment and silence:  “And when our gaze lights on a monstrous deed, the soul stands still the while…And if as a man, I am silenced in my agony, a god taught me to speak of how I suffer.” 

Elvira identifies with humans falling silent in their pain and expresses anxiety over castration, the act of demasculation, a reference to the impossible sacrifice it would take to rid the German male identity of the Nazi, which leads to a dream of a cemetery in which are buried not the dead, but the brief times “a person was truly happy.”  Next she visits the convent of her youth, and speaks with the Sister (Lilo Pempeit, Fassbinder’s mother), who describes the intense longing Erwin felt as a young boy waiting for the next visits from his step-parents to be with such detail that Elvira responds by fainting, remembering the stark emptiness she once felt when she realized the visits would eventually end.  Challenging or punctuating our notion of history and forgetfulness, Fassbinder creates a peculiar party sequence underscored by a shrieking soundtrack of recorded screams with one man talking incessantly while another quietly pumps iron, or Elvira witnesses a black man hang himself in one of Anton Saetz’s empty rooms but not before he helps open her bottle of wine, while in another Zora watches television while Elvira is asleep, as a news broadcast details the horrors of Pinochet's regime in Chile, where Fassbinder places himself on the television right after the newsreel footage, literally implicating himself in Armin Meier’s tragic death.  The unforgettable tape recorded narration heard throughout the film (particularly during the final scene) was not scripted, but was recorded with Fassbinder asking questions of Volker Spengler answering in character, where by the end, Fassbinder’s voice was cut out, as Elvira in the end quietly decides to end her life.  The film utilizes harsh color, asymmetric sets, a dissonant sound track, and alternating narrative techniques to evoke the depths of Evira’s pain, a film of suffering, muteness, and repression, emanating grief like no other movie, stretching the boundaries of conventional storytelling, also starring Elisabeth Trissenaar and Eva Mattes, dedicated to Armin Meier - - easily Fassbinder’s most personal film.

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.