The Bourne Cinema Filmography: Claire Denis, "35 Shots of Rum" (2008)

35 Shots of Rum (35 rhums). 2008. Directed by Claire Denis. Written by Claire Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau. Produced by Bruno Pesery. Cinematography by Agnes Godard. Edited by Guy Lecorne. Music by Tindersticks. Production design by Arnaud de Moleron. Costume design by Judy Shrewsbury. Sound by Martin Boissau, Christophe Winding, and Dominique Hennequin.

Cast: Alex Descas (Lionel), Mati Diop (Josephine), Gregoire Colin (Noe), Nicole Dogue (Gabrielle), Julieth Mars Toussaint (Rene).

One of the very best films you will see this year is Claire Denis' exquisitely rendered 35 Shots of Rum, now playing at Film Forum through September 29. Denis' latest film White Material, which returns her to the African setting of her debut Chocolat, will make its latest stop at this year's New York Film Festival, after its appearances in Venice and Toronto. So New Yorkers will have the opportunity this fall to be blessed with two new films by one of cinema's greatest living artists. Below is my review of 35 Shots of Rum, written when it screened at last year's Pusan International Film Festival.

Claire Denis’ gorgeous new film, 35 Shots of Rum, is as essentially plot-less as her previous feature, the globe-trotting philosophical treatise L’Intrus (The Intruder), but it is less experimental and more grounded in character and emotion. However, it is hardly less of a revelatory experience. The central relationship depicted in this film is that of Lionel (Alex Descas), a train operator living with his daughter Josephine (Mati Diop), in a working-class suburb of Paris. 35 Shots of Rum’s affinities with the works of Ozu, especially Late Spring, have been much remarked on by other commentators: the many shots and scenes that revolve around trains; the brief establishing shots between scenes analogous to Ozu’s “pillow shot” inserts; the delicacy with which unspoken aspects of intimate relationships are handled. The film’s central situation also recalls Ozu. Lionel, a taciturn widower, lives a quiet life with his daughter, and their deep love for one another is expressed through such gestures as one early scene in which Lionel buys a rice cooker for Josephine, who expresses great delight. The film is so patient about revealing the connections between its characters that it takes a bit of time before we realize that they are in fact father and daughter.

Two other characters also figure here: their neighbor Noe (Gregoire Colin), a rather eccentric young man who is attracted to Josephine, and Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), Lionel’s ex-girlfriend who remains close to Lionel and Josephine, and seems to wish to rekindle her romance with Lionel, who in turn keeps her at arm’s length. Everything else in the film flows from this initial situation. But rather than imposing a dramatic plot, although almost any other filmmaker would have turned these potential conflicts into melodrama, Denis allows these characters to interact and lets their actions evolve organically. This is not to say that nothing happens in the film; actually, there is a definite progression that occurs, and it leads to a great deal of emotion. This occurs most significantly with what happens to Lionel’s colleague Rene (Julieth Mars Toussaint), who after being compelled to retire, finds himself adrift and unable to replace the order and sense of purpose that his job provided him.

The way in which Denis depicts the milieu of her film is quite extraordinary. The popular notion of the Parisian suburbs, many of which are inhabited by those of African and Arabic descent, is that of poor and angry people who every now and then erupt into riots against police and other authorities. The depiction of these neighborhoods in French films often plays upon these problems and concentrates on their conflicts with the larger French society. Denis, however, takes quite a different tack, concentrating much more on her characters as individuals rather than representatives of their race. These are ordinary working-class people who experience the normal joys and pains of anyone else, although presented here in an aesthetically beautiful way. Denis, to be sure, does not ignore a global perspective: she includes a key scene in which Josephine participates in a classroom debate about how African nations are adversely impacted by having to repay massive debts to Western nations. However, we are mostly immersed in the lives of the central characters, and it is always a pleasure to be in their company.

The loose structure of 35 Shots of Rum allows for some exquisitely lovely moments, most notably a key scene of the film in which Lionel, Josephine, Noe and Gabrielle all retreat into a bar during a rainstorm after their car breaks down on their way to a concert. Although the bar is already closed, the owner generously allows them shelter. A nearly wordless scene ensues, during which much occurs: Noe and Josephine’s relationship becomes subtly much more than a casual friendship; Lionel sees this happen, and tacitly accepts this despite his slight unease, while Lionel in turn acts upon his attraction to the statuesquely beautiful bar hostess, eventually spending the night with her. The four central characters dance to the tune of the Commodores’ song “Nightshift,” which is quite appropriate to the elegiac tone of much of this film. This is a beautifully choreographed and constructed scene, conveying everything through glances and gestures, and it is a great testament to Claire Denis’ prodigious artistry.

However, Denis is by no means a solo act. She has surrounded herself over the years with an ace group of collaborators who are essential partners in creating one of the great bodies of work in cinema. One of the most important members of her crew is Agnes Godard, one of the world’s greatest cinematographers, who seems incapable of composing a bad shot. She imbues all of the film’s environments with a textured, tactile quality that illuminates everything it touches. Denis’ regular screenwriting partner Jean-Pol Fargeau contributes greatly to a scenario that feels loosely improvisational yet exactingly precise at the same time. And of course, as always with Denis, much credit is due to the excellent cast she has assembled, which includes two Denis regulars: Alex Descas, a ruggedly handsome man who imparts tremendous gravity and great emotion to his role; and Gregoire Colin, who goes far beyond the quirks of his character to deliver a very poignant performance. Newcomer Mati Diop also impresses as the daughter who is protective of her father almost to his detriment (much like the typical Ozu heroine usually played by Setsuko Hara). Nicole Dogue skillfully expresses her character’s sense of regret over her life decisions, and her wish to have to same closeness with Lionel that his daughter enjoys. In every gesture and action Denis’ ensemble cast radiates a deep beauty that makes watching them a joyful experience.

35 Shots of Rum, along with Beau Travail and L’Intrus, is one of Denis’ greatest works, conveying the ebbs and flows of life with uncommon sensitivity. And by the time Lionel partakes of the titular drinks, an act that signifies his philosophy of life, one begins to wish one could spend many more hours in the endlessly fascinating world of this film.

35 Shots of Rum is at Film Forum through September 29. Click here to purchase tickets.

The Bourne Cinema Filmography: Jean-Luc Godard, "Breathless" (1960)

This post inaugurates a new feature on this blog, where I will offer thoughts on the works of significant directors, in chronological order, if possible. And what better place to start than with one of the most influential films ever made, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, the nouvelle vague shot heard round the world. Cinema hasn't been the same since.


Breathless (À bout de souffle). 1960. Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, based on an original treatment by François Truffaut. Produced by Georges de Beauregard. Cinematography by Raoul Coutard. Edited by Cécile Decugis. Music by Martial Solal.

Cast: Jean Seberg (Patricia Franchini), Jean-Paul Belmondo (Michel Poiccard), Daniel Boulanger (Inspector Vital), Henri-Jacques Huet (Antonio Berruti), Roger Hanin (Carl Zumbach), Van Doude (Van Doude), Liliane David (Liliane), Michel Fabre (Other Inspector), Jean-Pierre Melville (Parvulesco), Claude Mansard (Used Car Dealer), Jean-Luc Godard (Informer), Richard Balducci (Tolmachoff).

“After all, I’m an asshole.” Such is the self-description of Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), the central figure of Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature, which was, at least in part, a loving homage to the then American gangster B-pictures beloved by Godard and his cohorts at Cahiers du Cinema. The film is in fact dedicated to Monogram Pictures, one of the “Poverty Row” studios that often supplied the bottom half of the bills for the more prestigious mainstream Hollywood features shown in American movie theaters. Thanks largely to the Cahiers critics, those films have been celebrated long after the A-picture super-productions have been relegated to forgotten footnotes of film history. The America-philia carries over into the presence of Breathless’ leading lady, Jean Seberg. The star of Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse and Joan of Arc is a pixie-like presence floating though the luminous Paris of the film’s setting, the irrepressible yang to the aggressive, brutish yin of Poiccard. “J’aime beaucoup la France,” Poiccard opines while cruising in his stolen car, and so does Raoul Coutard’s camera. Long traveling shots of the city abound throughout, supplying the romanticism that this film revels in, drunk off the mystique of the City of Lights. The ghost of Humphrey Bogart hovers over Breathless, in Poiccard’s emulation of that actor’s persona. Poiccard is the lead of not only the movie we see, but the movie in his head, as he gleefully indulges his criminal activities and his quest to enlist his sometime girlfriend Patricia (Seberg) as his own leading lady. But Patricia goes off the script when she informs on him to the police, and refuses to go off into the sunset with him. Instead, after a comically protracted death dance, he is reduced to childish insults. “You make me want to puke,” he tells Patricia before he dies. “What does that mean?” Patricia asks as she emulates Poiccard’s habitual gesture, running her thumb over her lips. She turns her back on us, and the film fades out.

The non-stop jaunty jazz score by Martial Solal is the perfect accompaniment to the improvisational style of Godard’s film. A manifesto in opposition to the studio-bound productions of most French films, Godard took his camera to the streets, writing his actors’ dialogue day by day. “I never knew what would happen to Poiccard next,” Belmondo says in an interview included on the Criterion DVD. Godard’s first cut of the film was very long and unwieldy, and he knew he needed to cut extensively, but found it difficult to get rid of necessary scenes. Godard came up with the idea of cutting within shots, breaking continuity, a technique that became known as the jump cut. It was a radical visual style, well in keeping with the radicalism of the project. This technique has now been overused to the point of cliché, but seeing it here in this context, it retains a startling freshness. As does the entire film.

Breathless trailer:



The beginning:



The ending ("Qu'est-ce que c'est 'degueulasse'?"):

Review Archive: Bruno Dumont's "L’Humanité"

Happy New Year!

This year is already looking very promising, with many interesting new releases, film series, and retrospectives. While I work on some new pieces, I thought I would post some of my older reviews, some of which were written for a film website that is now defunct. Now they'll finally have a home, along with some previously unpublished reviews. I'll begin with my very first published review.

L’Humanité. 1999. Written and directed by Bruno Dumont. Produced by Rachid Bouchareb and Jean Bréhat. Cinematography by Yves Cape. Edited by Guy Lecorne. Music by Richard Cuvillier. Production design by Marc-Philippe Guerig. Costume design by Nathalie Raoul. Sound by Jean-Pierre Laforce and Pierre Mertens.

Cast: Emmanuel Schotté (Pharaon De Winter), Séverine Caneele (Domino), Philippe Tullier (Joseph), Ghislain Ghesquère (Police Chief), Ginette Allegre (Eliane), Daniel Leroux (Nurse), Arnaud Brejon de la Lavergnee (Conservationist).

In this age of digital cinema, hi-def, and ever-increasingly sophisticated special effects, and in many cases, increasingly soulless and mind-numbing popcorn-and-soda movies, it is a bracing blast of fresh air to see a film that eschews all of this smoke-and-mirror action to focus on real, plausible human characters. This is exemplified by a beautiful, baffling, ambiguous, and ultimately courageous little film called L’Humanité, from French director Bruno Dumont [whose latest film Flanders I reviewed here last year]. Dumont’s previous film was La Vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus), which dealt with a brutal, none-too-bright punk living in a small, rural town whose life is inexplicably touched by divinity. At the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, L’Humanité, along with the top prizewinner, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Rosetta, was one of The Little French Films That Could, coming from seemingly out of nowhere to grab all of the top prizes.

L’Humanité was quite controversial and unpopular at Cannes, and understandably so. Dumont’s film brazenly flies in the face of just about convention of storytelling, character, pacing, and mood we have been used to seeing in films. The basic skeleton of the film’s “plot” (in quotes for reasons that will soon be clear) is one we’ve seen in thousands of films: a police investigation of the rape and murder of a young girl (in this case, very young, about 11 or 12). This is a scenario which has just about been done to death, and the predictable outlines of this type of story are too familiar to even bother rehashing here. L’Humanité, far from being even a radical interpretation or variation on this tale, almost completely ignores the conventions altogether.

A brief description of the film’s opening, an arresting set of images, will give you an idea of what I’m talking about. The first image is a field, a high grassy hill. We hear footsteps on the soundtrack, but can’t tell where they’re coming from. After a couple of minutes, we see a tiny figure walking across the top of the hill; the camera rests, unmoving, until the man walks out of the frame. Cut to a close shot of the man walking, the camera following him closely. Suddenly, the man falls, hard. He lies on the ground, unmoving. Cut to a close-up of the man’s face, eyes staring blankly. At first, it looks as if he is dead, until we see he is breathing. Cut to the dead girl’s body, lying in the grass. Then an extreme close-up of the girl’s spread-eagled legs, the camera looking straight up into the girl’s vagina. Back to the man, who gets up, crawling on the ground. We think: is he the murderer? But then, he crawls over to a police car, opens the door, and speaks into the walkie-talkie, and we realize he is a cop. This is Dumont’s style: sharp, often raw images that force us to continually question what we are seeing. Just when we think we’ve caught on to a thread that will explain things, Dumont will throw an image at us that completely unsettles us. Dumont sustains this sense of ambiguity throughout the entire picture, quite a remarkable achievement.




Dumont also flouts the conventions of the police procedural by almost completely abandoning the investigation for over an hour, as we follow the daily life of the investigator, which oddly seems to consist of very little actual police work, other than a very cryptic scene early on at the police station where his boss chastises him for being out of it, and slacking off. The investigator, whose name we learn is Pharaon (Emmanuel Schotté), lives with his mother in a small house. We see minute, mundane details of his activities. He goes biking, eats an apple and nearly chokes on it, watches a soccer game. Dumont seems to almost perversely rob his story of any conventional action or suspense. Eventually, we see Pharaon interacting with a woman named Domino (Séverine Caneele) who lives a few doors down. Domino, not a particularly attractive woman in the conventional sense, works at a factory in town. It soon becomes clear that Pharaon is attracted to Domino. Domino, however, has a boyfriend, Joseph (Philippe Tullier), who visits frequently. In one of the film’s most striking scenes, Domino and Joseph engage in rough and extremely vigorous sex, while Pharaon watches them outside her open bedroom door. Domino seems to have genuine affection for Pharaon, and often invites him along on her dates with Joseph, who puts up with Pharaon for Domino’s sake, but treats him with barely concealed contempt. We are given very little information about these characters. For example, we learn that Pharaon “lost” his wife and daughter some years ago, but exactly what happened to them is never explained.


The performances in the film are quite unusual. It’s almost a misnomer to term what we see in this film “acting.” What Schotté, especially, does in this film seems too raw, too naked, too unpolished to be termed acting, at least in the normal sense. Schotté retains a wide-eyed, penetrating stare throughout the film, like an overgrown child. In fact, we wonder if his character is slow, or even slightly mentally retarded. And if so, how does someone such as this become a police superintendent? Such speculations, however, soon become increasingly unimportant. I interpret this character as an empath, someone who seemingly feels all of the world’s pain, to the extent that it may have wrecked his own mental health. The film’s title clues us in to the purpose of Pharaon’s character. We are meant to see him as a representative of humankind itself, in all its mystery, its ambiguity, its sexiness, its kindness, its evil. Pharaon, whose guilelessness and naked displays of emotion invite us to see him as a completely open book, nevertheless retains an unfathomable inner core. Dumont offers in L’Humanité an unflinching, unsettling look at people that we can believe actually exist. They are not forced to fit into pre-molded boxes, or packaged to be attractive people we can vicariously pretend to be. In a way, we are forced to look at ourselves and question our own knowledge of what we are. It is as if the film’s nominal subject, the rape/murder investigation, is only a red herring to bait us into this questioning of ourselves.

The film’s visual style perfectly matches its philosophy. Yves Cape’s beautiful widescreen photography and the sharp, precise editing by Guy Lecorne effectively illustrate the tension between the beauty of the landscape and the evil that occurs within it. There is an earthiness and rawness to the images that key in perfectly to Dumont’s themes. Pharaon’s face in the dirt, the dead little girl, Domino’s rough sex: Dumont practically rubs our face in the fact that these are all aspects of, and inseparable from, the “humanity” of the film’s title. The images provocatively link sex and death, but never in a pretentious or heavy-handed way. Dumont in this film (even more so than the more overtly religious La Vie de Jésus) proves himself to be a worthy cinematic heir to Robert Bresson, making a similar use of Bresson’s signature use of nonactors, direct sound, lack of music, and themes of transcendence and grace, despite certain major differences between the two in their approaches. Appropriately for a film that so sublimely uses its indelible images to tell its story, L’Humanité contains all its themes within its first image: the tiny figure walking on the hill. That figure is all of us: ultimately alone, surrounded by a vast landscape, a universe that, with our limited senses, we can hardly hope to completely understand.

Rendez-vous with French Cinema 2007 Review: Bruno Dumont's "Flanders"

Flanders (Flandres). 2006. Written and directed by Bruno Dumont. Produced by Jean Brehat and Rachid Bouchareb. Cinematography by Yves Cape. Edited by Guy Lecorne. Sound design by Philippe Lecoeur. Costume design by Cedric Grenapin and Alexandra Charles.

Cast: Adelaide Leroux (Barbe), Samuel Boidin (Demester), Henri Cretel (Blondel), Jean-Marie Bruveart (Briche), David Poulain (Leclercq), Patrice Venant (Mordac), David Legay (Lieutenant), Inge Decaesteker (France).

Bruno Dumont’s latest film, Flanders, screening in Lincoln Center’s “Rendez-vous with French Cinema 2007” series, which runs at the Walter Reade Theater from February 28 through March 11, is a highlight of this year’s selections. A return to form after his failed US-set experiment, Twentynine Palms, Flanders returns Dumont to his familiar milieu of raw sex and violence told with Bressonian preciseness and economy. While Flanders is not quite up to the level of his near-masterpieces Life of Jesus and Humanity, it is a searing vision of war and its effects on those who fight it and those they leave behind, made all the more powerful by Dumont’s painfully unadorned and stripped-down presentation. Following Dumont’s usual method of casting, the actors in Flanders are all non-professionals.

We first encounter Demester (Samuel Boidin), working on his farm. We soon learn he is about to go off to war; whether he has been drafted or volunteered is unclear. Demester is a rather brutish-looking, inarticulate hulk of a man; the actor portraying him is one of the very distinctive ones that Dumont has an uncanny ability to discover. He speaks with a friend about the war, in very plain and simple terms.

We are then introduced to the film’s other central character, Barbe (Adelaide Leroux), Demester’s sometime paramour, and there is an early scene of the two having sex in the woods near the farm, shot in an unblinking fashion that emphasizes the animalistic nature of the coupling. This sort of non-dramatized vision will be carried throughout the rest of the film, both in the home and war scenes.

Before Demester is about to go to war, he has drinks with Barbe and other friends in a local bar. Perhaps to distance himself from Barbe’s reputation as the town slut, he denies that they have a real relationship. To punish him, she picks up another man, the more conventionally handsome Blondel (Henri Cretel), who will soon join Demester in the war, fighting in the same regiment. The pain on Demester’s face as he watches them is quite palpable. Later, Barbe tearfully embraces them both before they go off to fight.

Up to this point, the bleak rural setting (beautifully rendered by Dumont’s regular cinematographer Yves Cape) and the lack of an obvious contemporary feel would lead one into thinking this is a period film, perhaps set during World War I, in which Flanders was a famous setting. It is a surprise, then, that when we finally see the men in the battlefield, they are fighting a modern war in a Middle Eastern desert, clearly evoking the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The country they are in is unnamed, and the nature of the conflict is never stated. What everything is reduced to is casual brutality on both sides. The soldiers shoot two teenage boy soldiers and brutally rape a female soldier. Dumont frames these scenes in medium shot, without cutting, close-ups or musical underlining, a matter-of-fact method that makes them all the more disturbing. Demester, however, doesn’t seem to participate in these atrocities; he simply observes them, but does nothing to protest or stop them. Later, the soldiers are captured by enemy forces, in which they are shot, tortured, and subjected to the same treatment they have given out.

The film alternates between the battlefield and the farm, where Barbe becomes increasingly agitated, to the point that she is committed to a mental hospital. She also aborts Blondel’s child. Barbe seems to feel the cruelty of the war in an extremely empathetic way; after the soldiers shoot the children in the stomach, there is a cut to Barbe holding her stomach. Although this is perhaps due to her pregnancy, the juxtaposition of these shots suggests otherwise. An outburst she makes to Demester later in the film, where she says she saw what happened in the war, confirms this. Barbe, far from the battle, feels the death and destruction keenly, while Demester and the other soldiers commit brutal acts without remorse or any recognizable human feeling. We can infer from this that in Dumont’s view, women, as far more empathetic creatures than men, are far less likely to cause the conflicts that lead to the carnage that we see here.

Demester returns from the war, in the film’s terms, just as abruptly as he went in. Outwardly, he seems unchanged, returning to his usual life of work on the farm, and sex with Barbe. When asked about the war, he says simply, “It was hell out there.” However, the film’s final scenes drive home how profoundly he has been transformed by his war experience. Culminating in a final scene that explicitly evokes Bresson’s character epiphanies (especially Pickpocket), Flanders offers a vision of war that is quietly shattering and quite moving, remarkably achieving this without overt politics or specifics, rendering Dumont’s essential truths in quite visceral relief.

Flanders screens on March 4 and 5. For more information on this film and others in the series, see the Film Society’s website.

Flanders trailer: