Film Friday: Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum and White Material

A quiet movie called 35 Shots of Rum is traveling around the country, a film of uncommon grace, and I mention this because I’d like to see it again myself whenever I have the chance. I’m waiting for it to come to my town; maybe you’re doing the same. World-class filmmaker Claire Denis made the movie last year, and anyone who’s been keeping score knows that I’m one of her unabashed fans. Name the date, and I’ll be there.

The most curious feature of her films is that they sneak up on you, without fail. I remember watching her 2000 film Beau Travail, not even entirely sure what was happening but captivated all the same. Many viewings later, I’m certain that it’s a masterpiece. I came away from her 2002 film Friday Night thinking it was good but not great, only to be floored when I revisited the film a year later and found that every shot spoke to me. It’s a tour de force. The uncharacteristically gruesome Trouble Every Day is hard to watch even once, and yet it’s so lovely and hypnotic at times that I’ve been pulled back, time and again, like a moth to a flame. The score by the Tindersticks is truly one of the most beautiful and sad things I’ve ever heard, but since it makes me think of the movie, just a few bars give me a somber chill.

And 35 Shots of Rum felt good but slight to me on the first run through last September, but a few days later when I watched it again I was a bit teary throughout the final third.

Denis insists that she doesn’t make her films deliberately difficult to grasp on a single viewing. And, true, they’re not intellectual or complicated. But somehow her natural impulse is to let audiences discover rather than be told, so basic establishing shots that might seem inconsequential to an eye that was trained on other filmmakers’ imprecisions will take on new meaning when you know they have purpose. They’re not random shots of train tracks at the beginning of the film; they’re the meandering thoughts of the train’s engineer, a man whom we’re about to meet and whose thoughts we will intuit in time, if we’re patient and observant.

Denis, bless her, is also not afraid to let a mystery remain a mystery. What’s the significance of 35 shots? The question comes up in the film, but the answer does not. The entirety of her 2004 film The Intruder feels like a puzzle, but I think it’s more like an artifact with a history that we simply can’t know. What’s happening at the end of Beau Travail? It’s a spastic, joyous moment. When, where, and how? Unimportant.

35 Shots of Rum is about a daughter who lives with her widower father. Their bond is strong, their life is comfortable, but the father feels that the young woman needs to move on. It’s that simple, as simple as unspoken nudges, as simple and heartfelt as a film by Ozu (which, it turns out, was one of the inspirations ).

Actor Alex Descas and director Claire Denis on the set of 35 Shots of Rum

Even if the movie looked slight after one viewing, even if I might have been inclined to call it a “minor” Denis film, I was never more certain that slightness is a virtue than when I saw Denis’s even newer film, White Material which is currently playing at festivals. On paper it sounds like her thing. In an unnamed African country, a white French plantation owner struggles to keep her operation afloat well after the climate has become dangerous for foreign nationals. Isabelle Huppert stars. Denis grew up in Africa, and foreignness is a theme that recurs throughout her work. She knows this world.

But for the first time I was disappointed by a Claire Denis film, by its relentless march, its hurried pace, its fatalism, its inescapable conclusions. I could sense Denis in some of the themes, or in the presence of the Tindersticks on the soundtrack, but otherwise I wondered what forces were at play behind the scenes, shaping, compressing, and hardening this film.

As it turns out, Denis made 35 Shots of Rum at almost the same time as White Material, rather quickly. I’ve seen this pattern before, this retreat from a large or heavy project to something lighter and freer. Francis Ford Coppola made The Conversation, essentially a short story, between two epic Godfathers. Wong Kar-Wai made the charming Chungking Express as a palette cleanser after the difficult and sprawling Ashes of Time. Steven Soderbergh follows this pattern not as an impromptu escape but as a system, the “one for them one for me” approach to directing. In the industry, they call the little slivers between the blockbusters “tweeners,” but I think Soderbergh, Richard Linklater, and other tweener practitioners are doing something different. Coppola, Wong, and perhaps Denis seemed to retreat to quiet oases not as a business strategy but as a creative one, as a defensive move, fleeing to fertile new ground solely to reinvigorate a part of their brains. The movies they made when they did that are fantastic.

I’ve only seen White Material once, so it’s a bit early to lump Denis in with these other folks, and I have no idea whether she’d concur with this speculation. I also hold out two hopes that another viewing of the newer film will lift my spirits. First, it’s far from a disaster. In the ongoing survey of critics at indieWIRE, the film has an average grade of B+ . So thoughtful critics are finding great value in the film. (Even in my disappointment, I acknowledged it’s a B.)

Second, and more importantly, Denis has surprised me before. Repeatedly. Even when I know she’s going to, even when I have my guard up, even when I try to be alert. Her films simply do not unfold easily, and I love them for it. So I’ll be back for more, after White Material leaves the festival circuit.

In the mean time, 35 Shots of Rum, already certified as wonderful, is playing in a few cities at a time. I’ll gladly see it again when it stops in Chicago.

Rob Davis is Paste’s chief film critic.