35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008)

Mati Diop and Alex Descas in 35 Shots of Rum

Cast: Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogué, Grégoire Colin, Julieth Mars Toussaint, Adèle Ado, Jean-Christophe Folly, Ingrid Caven. Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau. Cinematography: Agnès Godard. Production design: Arnaud de Moleron. Film editing: Guy Lecorne. Music: Tindersticks.

If I hadn't read that Claire Denis said that 35 Shots of Rum was inspired by Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring (1949), I'm not certain I would have spotted it. But once I learned that fact, it became obvious. Both films are about widowers living with their daughters, and both end with the daughter's marriage and the father contemplating loneliness. I would have to rewatch Late Spring to cite other parallels, but the central fact is that both films share a bittersweet, melancholy tone. It's striking to an American, especially one living in the Trump era of heightened racial awareness, that not much is made of the fact that Lionel (Alex Desecas) and Jo (Mati Diop) are black. It may be that it lingers as a subtext in the film, the way the devastation of Japan in the war lingers in the background of Ozu's films, surfacing in Denis's film only when the anthropology class Jo attends begins to discuss postcolonialism, with references to the radicalism of Frantz Fanon and other writers. Mostly, however, we stay in the enclosed world of Lionel and Jo and their friends, Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and Noé (Grégoire Colin). One of the film's challenges (and delights) is that Denis plunges us into their world without exposition, leaving us to discover the relationships (and even the names) of the characters as the narrative unfolds. For a while at the start of the film, I took Lionel and Jo to be a married couple or lovers, so close is their relationship, until it became apparent that they were father and daughter. Even the title takes some time to work out its significance: It refers to a ritual drinking bout that's supposed to occur at important celebrations, and we first see it at the retirement party of René (Julieth Mars Toussaint), Lionel's fellow driver in the metropolitan Paris train system. Though Lionel gets fairly inebriated, he decides the occasion isn't important enough to consume all 35 shots of rum. Eventually, René is unable to cope with loneliness and lack of purpose after the mandatory retirement and kills himself on the train tracks where Lionel is driving. René's death adds poignancy to Lionel's facing life alone after Jo marries -- a wedding at which he does indeed go through with the 35 shots ritual. Denis's film is a subtle, moving delight, full of details that are enough to provoke extended contemplation or even a rewatching. Decas and Diop (who would go on to direct her own fine film, Atlantics, in 2019) give quietly extraordinary performances. 

La Vie de Jésus (Bruno Dumont, 1997)

La Vie de Jésus (Bruno Dumont, 1997)

Cast: David Douche, Marjorie Cottreel, Kader Chaatouf, Sébastien Delbaare, Samuel Boidin, Steve Smagghe, Sébastien Bailleul, Geneviève Cottreel. Screenplay: Bruno Dumont. Cinematography: Philippe Van Leeuw. Production design: Frédérique Suchet. Film editing: Yves Deschamps, Guy Lecorne. Music: Richard Cuvillier.

From its enigmatic title to its uncompromising lack of narrative structure, Bruno Dumont's first feature challenges a viewer's patience but ultimately, I think, rewards it. Dumont has explained (sort of) the title as a reference to Ernest Renan's 1863 book of the same name, a biography of Jesus that purges all miracles and holiness from its story. There are no miracles or holiness to be found in the life of Freddy, a young lout growing up in a small town in northern France, where his mother keeps a bar and occasionally nags him about his idleness. It's the kind of town where people spend a lot of time sitting on their front stoops or staring at the television. Freddy spends his time with his chums, riding motorbikes around the countryside, playing drums in the town band, having sex with his pretty girlfriend, and raising a caged finch that he enters in chirping contests. The finch's frantic movements in its confinement may be a kind of metaphor for the turmoil behind Freddy's usually impassive façade, which shatters only when he experiences one of the epileptic attacks that send him to therapy. Naturally, so much aimlessness gets Freddy into serious trouble, but the film ends with only a symbolic redemption as he escapes from police interrogation, rides into the country, and lies in the tall grass, staring into the sky and starting to cry. The bleakness of Dumont's vision of the life of Freddy and his cohort of fellow layabouts can be trying, and Dumont makes no attempt to leaven his story with humor. Yet I found myself drawn in by the performances of a group of nonprofessional actors, and I appreciated Dumont's references in a Criterion interview to his film as a kind of equivalent to Flemish paintings of idling peasants and burghers. 

White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)

White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Lambert, Nicolas Devauchelle, William Nadylam, Michel Subor, Isaach De Bankolé, Adèle Ado, Ali Barkai. Screenplay: Claire Denis, Marie N'Diaye, Lucie Borleteau. Cinematography: Yves Cape. Production design: Abiassi Saint-Père. Film editing: Guy Lecorne. Music: Stuart Staples. 

Isabelle Huppert is an almost routinely extraordinary actress, and she gives one of her most striking performances in White Material, about the French owner of a coffee plantation in Africa. This is a far cry from Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1987), the glossy Oscar winner. Huppert's Maria Vial is a woman determined to the point of madness to get out her coffee crop during a civil war, even though the authorities have insisted she and her family should leave. Her husband, André (Christopher Lambert), is ready to flee, but she persists, even after their lazy, self-indulgent son, Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), is captured by young rebel soldiers, abused, and possibly raped. Things continue to escalate in ever more complex and chaotic ways. It's an often harrowing film, held together in large part by Huppert's magnetism. 

L'Humanité (Bruno Dumont, 1999)

Cast: Emmanuel Schotté, Séverine Caneele, Philippe Tullier, Ghislain Ghesquère, Ginette Allègre. Screenplay: Bruno Dumont. Cinematography: Yves Cape. Production design: Marc-Philippe Guerig. Film editing: Guy Lecorne. Music: Richard Cuvillier.

Emmanuel Schotté's performance as an unlikely police detective in L'Humanité won the best actor award at Cannes. The film, about the detective's efforts to solve a case involving the rape and murder of a little girl,  is full of enigmatic moments and even paranormal events that test a viewer's credulity, but it winds up exerting a kind of exasperated fascination.

Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis, 2017)

Juliette Binoche and Xavier Beauvois in Let the Sunshine In

Isabelle: Juliette Binoche
Vincent: Xavier Beauvois
The Actor: Nicolas Duvauchelle
François: Laurent Gréville
Marc: Alex Descas
Fabrice: Bruno Podalydès
Sylvain: Paul Blain
Denis: Gérard Depardieu
Mathieu: Philippe Katerine
Maxime: Josiane Balasko
Ariane: Sandrine Dumas

Director: Claire Denis
Screenplay: Christine Angot, Claire Denis
Based on a book by Roland Barthes
Cinematography: Agnès Godard
Production design: Arnaud de Moleron
Film editing: Guy Lecorne
Music: Stuart Staples

I'm not familiar with the films of Claire Denis, and to judge from the somewhat mixed reviews of Let the Sunshine In, I may have picked the wrong one to start with. It is certainly talky, in that peculiarly French way of batting ideas back and forth like tennis balls, without anyone ever scoring. It's hard for someone coming into it cold to figure out what it is: a psychological drama, a comedy, a treatise on love and sex? And it was only at the end, when Gérard Depardieu imposes his corporosity on the film, playing a kind of upscale guru/fortune teller who wags a pendant over the photographs of Isabelle's lovers and delivers "predictions" that have all the soothing ambiguity of a newspaper horoscope column, that I decided: It's a satire. Specifically, one directed at everyone's confusion about relationships. That realization almost made me want to go back and watch it again to confirm my revelation, but I'm not sure I can subject myself so soon again to all that talk. What makes the film work as well as many think it does is the performance of the always-wonderful Juliette Binoche as Isabelle, a woman with several lovers ... no, strike that, I mean sexual partners. The first one we see right away, the banker named Vincent, having sex with Isabelle. But there's no postcoital glow: Immediately, Vincent reveals himself as an absolute jerk, which is reinforced by a subsequent scene in a bar where Vincent pointlessly torments an innocent bartender, ordering him to place the bottle here, the glass there, and asking him if they have any "gluten-free olives." Next, there's an unnamed actor, with whom Isabelle definitely has chemistry, but who reveals himself to be as self-conscious about relationships as she is. And so on. The upshot is that Isabelle and her partners are guilty of what D.H. Lawrence denounced as "sex in the head." But the trouble with the film seems to me that it has no narrative shape: Isabelle is as confused at the end as she is at the beginning, so there's no arc to follow though the film. Her life is a series of crises that may feel achingly familiar to many viewers, but aside from some wonderful moments -- as when Isabelle mocks a group of her fellow artists, gathered for a symposium in the country, for their pretentious admiration of nature -- I felt emptier at the end of Let the Sunshine In than at the beginning.